


I Can Change

by Killtheselights, TheLadyoftheHouse



Series: The Desired Effect [1]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: ABO, Biting, Car Sex, Cum shot, Established Relationship, F/M, God Bless the Chevy Silverado, I'll Be What You're Looking For, Like Actual Wolf Pack Dynamics, Nevada, Not That Kind of A/B/O, Poor Leia she puts up with so much shenanigans, Reylo - Freeform, Scent Marking, Werewolves, Werewolves Turn Into Actual Wolves, a/b/o dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-10-13
Packaged: 2019-07-17 09:35:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16092929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Killtheselights/pseuds/Killtheselights, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLadyoftheHouse/pseuds/TheLadyoftheHouse
Summary: I can bendI can breakI can shiftI can shakeBlaze a trail through the driving rainGirl I can change for youI can change for youHow do you apologize to your girlfriend when you know you've made a horrible mistake?Now how do you do that when your girlfriend is a werewolf, and you're hours away from the full moon?





	1. Part 1: Waxing Moon

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the first entry of "The Desired Effect," a series of disconnected Reylo AUs inspired by the 2015 album of the same name by Brandon Flowers. 
> 
> We will be releasing short fics, including smaller multichapter works, periodically, though not necessarily in track order.
> 
> We here at House/Lights Productions hope you enjoy!

The first rays of morning sunlight begin to color the horizon. In the distance, he can see the blurred shapes. The pack is moving home, preparing to transform back into humans, or so they will appear. Men and women at the grocery store, the movies, restaurant. Mechanics. In front of you in traffic. Your neighbors. They hand you the mail you drop as you pass by them on the stairs. Right now, they’re all fur and teeth and jaws, but in a few moments, that will change.

Sitting on a large boulder on top of the hill, he watches. Just waiting.

They part around him like a river of fur, entirely ignoring this giant of a man in their midst. The warmth and safety of home is a scent stuck in their nostrils and they will stop for no man. 

Save for one. A smaller, tawny wolf with eyes the color of old gold. It stops a few feet away from his perch, regarding him with cool intensity and a faint snarl. The rest of the pack flows past, indifferent to the stopped straggler. This one can take care of itself.   
  
In moments, they are alone at the top of the hill, the sun just peeking over the rock formations in the distance. He is unarmed against the creature, carrying only a large old t-shirt and a bouquet of flowers, still wrapped in the colorful grocery store floral department cellophane. Besides the audible quickening of his heart, he is unafraid.   
  
He clears his throat, eyes scanning the wolf.   
  
"Hi," he says. He hesitates for a moment, waiting for a response. "Can we talk?"

The wolf approaches steadily, eyes unwavering. It circles him, sniffing at his jeans with almost aloof disinterest. It returns to its original position, staring him down with what might be disgust on its lupine face. 

If the creature had eyebrows, he thinks that one would be arched, unamused, up at him. It’s a very  _ her _ expression. Maybe he’s just projecting.

He offers the old t-shirt, extending his arm and holding it between his fingers as if trying to keep it as far away from him as humanly possible without dropping it. As if it were a dirty thing. He just washed it for this occasion.   
  
"If you want to...I won't look." He turns his head away, staring off into the desert. 

"Certainly didn't stop you before."   
  
By the time he whips his head back, she's standing there; naked and glowing in the coral light, her hair loose and wild around her shoulders, her eyes still glinting gold, her expression just shy of furious.   
  
She doesn't take the shirt, her hands planted firmly on her sharp hips.

He jolts, the tension that had coiled in his muscles unleashed at the sight of her, human, before him. Her rage is rolling off of her in torrents.   
  
He wants to tell her she looks beautiful. He thinks of the wolf that had just been standing there. He thinks of the sound of skin tearing and bones cracking that he had done his best to ignore. He thinks better of it.   
  
He drops the shirt on his lap.    
  
"Oh. Right. Look, Rey, I wanted to apologize for what I did."

"You're going to have to be more specific, you've been pretty busy with the bullshit lately," she growls.

"Well, I guess I wanted to start with the other night." His eyes dart away first from her face, then from her body, then desperately seek the fauna at her feet so he doesn't have to see that feral gold glint in her eye.   
  
"But I think I've got a lot of explaining to do before we get to that point, huh?"

"Yeah no shit, Kylo."    
  
He had planned a dinner as a surprise. He knew the shift nights were coming and their dates wouldn’t be able to resume until they ended, so he planned an early dinner before sunset on the first shift night. A special occasion, he’d said. And that was all he’d said.   
  
He didn’t mind that she was underdressed at a swanky steakhouse. He thought she looked lovely in her tennis shoes and jeans. What bothered him was that she hadn’t enjoyed herself at all.   
  
She had never been in a place this formal, and her skin crawled the whole time. She didn’t belong there. The staff would throw pitying glances in her direction that told her as much.   
  
Kylo wasn’t fancy enough for that place either, but he’d had the social breeding and the suit jacket that made him look the part. She wore what she thought was a nice top and more shame than she thought could fit in her body.

And a steakhouse?   
  
Jesus, could he have been more tactless, he reflected after. He thought it was  _ nice _ , and maybe it would be good for her to have a lot of protein before the shift.   
  
He forgot to consider that while his father had taken his mother to steak dinners often, that it might seem tacky to wolves to take them to a place that featured meat and cooked and served it as if that were some sort of accomplishment. Rey probably could hunt and kill her own and enjoy it far more.

But sadly, that gauche part of the evening was not the worst of his sins.

The change is still fresh in her muscles and it makes her twitchy, so she prowls slowly around the rock he's sitting on. She catches the spike in his scent on the dewy morning air; lemon-sour adrenaline layered over his usual sandalwood and molasses smell. She can't deny that it’s an appealing combination.   
  
"You've got a lot of balls coming out here on a shift night. You're lucky it wasn't a full moon or we might not be having this conversation. Hard for you to talk with a missing jawbone."

He doesn't flinch at her casual threat, but brandishes the bouquet like a shield between them.    
  
"It's urgent, and this was the only time I figured I couldn't miss you." It is at this moment that the foolhardiness of the gesture dawns on him. He could have been maimed had he come too early, or missed her entirely if he were too late. He doesn't pause to consider which outcome would have been worse. The scar that stretches from his eyebrow to his collarbone speaks volumes on his opinion of personal safety.

He knows that he had made a mistake. He felt it in the iciness radiating from her side of the truck cab as he drove her back to the den. He popped a cassette of Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell,” into the tape deck, and despite the fact he knew it was Rey’s favorite and they had sang every song together before, she didn’t open her mouth. She just glared out the window for mile after mile of dusty highway until they arrived onto pack lands.

He watched her go with sorrow, trying to figure out what he had done wrong.   
  
He watched her go for too long.

He grabbed a sandwich out of one of the refrigerated cases, put the “Out to Lunch” sign on the door of the store, and drove out to the casino to see if he could find her to apologize.   
  
She was working alright, dealing blackjack to the locals who refused to deal with the commercial strip but weren’t going to give up gambling altogether, but when he sat down and greeted her, he felt a chill from her that you just don’t get in these parts of Nevada.   
  
“Rey?”

No answer. Just the slap of the cards against the table and the clinking of chips. Her tone was professional and cordial as she talked with the players, but he could see her almost straining her eyes to keep them as far away from him as possible.   
  
He knew he was running out of time before he had to be back at the shop (an hour lunch was pushing it), but he tried to grab her as she switched tables.   
  
“Rey, talk to me?”

His fingers brushed her bare arm and she whipped around, snapping her teeth together with a snarl. Her eyes burned like molten gold and he could feel the heat of her stare searing through his face. He withdrew his hand and watched her walk away, deeper into the dingy, windowless room.

Point taken.   
  
He tried calling the den, tried to get her on the phone before the pack took off. Wolves don’t ever fucking answer phones.   
  
An idea struck him. After he closed down the store for the night, he drove into town and picked out flowers. He had learned the general pack movements on shift nights. He just had to wait.   
  
"I know I messed up the other day. You didn't deserve that. I was rash. I was stupid. And you know it's not easy for me to admit that." He glances over his shoulder at her, peering out from under his eyelashes. He knows how to turn on the charm. She knows he knows.

She scoffs. “Rash and stupid doesn’t even begin to—get that shit out of my face.”    
  
She bats away the flowers, rounding on him. She can feel the yellow creeping in around the edges of her vision. She’s angry, god she is  _ so _ fucking livid, but there is a weak part of her brain, soft and pink and  _ human _ that reminds her that she’ll regret it if she tears out his throat right now.    
  
He had made her feel ashamed at the restaurant, and she was usually too busy trying to stay alive to worry about how people perceived her, so that was a huge violation. She was too furious to express to him just how much he had hurt her, but she was late to meet the pack, which was even worse. He had driven her home and dropped her off at the den, and as soon as the car slowed enough, her seatbelt was off and she was running. 

She didn’t have time to change inside. She heard the howls, she saw the swollen moon, almost full, and she just ran behind the house she shared with the pack and stripped, kicking off her shoes, stowing her outer clothes inside an old trash can behind the den (kept for just this purpose), and discarding her underthings on the run.    
  
She’s in a clearing when she folds and unfolds her body into the shift, but a loud clunking sound instantly floods her ears.    
  
She looks up towards the road, and there’s Kylo’s black pickup.    
  
And there’s Kylo, jackass peering down at her from the driver’s seat.   
  
If she hadn’t been late, he would have been human jerky. There would be no opportunities for apologies.   
  
She tries to breathe the way the betas in the pack have been trying to teach her, trying to calm the beast within.    
  
“Do you have any concept of how violated I felt? Did that even cross your mind when you followed me home?”

She barks a bitter laugh.    
  
“No, of course it didn’t. You thought that just because an ex-girlfriend forced you to sit through  _ Blood and Chocolate _ , you suddenly have the right to watch me shift.”

He is too busy mentally kicking himself for even considering approaching his angry werewolf girlfriend without any form of protection or backup plan that he doesn't remember to ask what the hell "Blood and Chocolate" is.   
  
"I'm sorry. I didn't know that was a line. At all. I should have asked you about it. About how you felt."

“Yeah? And would that have happened before or after I found out that I had an audience?” She scoffs. “Asking forgiveness before permission, of course…”   
  
He tries to keep his eyes focused squarely on her face, but he can’t meet her gaze. He looks at the dirt rather than accidentally look at her body, parts that as a couple they hadn’t yet shared with one another. He places the flowers across his lap and tucks his legs up under him.    
  
"I wasn’t trying to. It’s not like I was creeping on you on purpose.” It’s really hard for him to explain that he fucked up while trying to figure out how he had already fucked up once that day. So he tries another tactic. 

“I didn't think. I didn’t think that I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. I get it, daywalker or not, I was seeing things I had no right seeing. I own that. But I don’t want you to think...it's not...it wouldn't be the first time I saw it. Well, it’s the first time I saw you. But I wasn’t..."

She drags her hands down over her face and growls deep in her chest.    
  
“Oh my god, Kylo, movies don’t. Fucking. Count!” she bites out, nearly puncturing her lip in the process as her canines are starting to elongate. “This is not Hollywood. This is my life. A life that I have fought tooth and claw to have.”   
  
“I meant--”

“Do you know how far I’ve had to climb to get out of the shitpool that was my life? I was homeless for six months! I mean, fuck, I hitched across Death Valley to get here and now I’ve got some assclown eyeing me up while I change. It’s like I never even left Texas!”   
  
“I wasn’t staring--”

“Oh and you can fuck right off with that bullshit! You  _ can  _ control your own body, can’t you? You do have that ability, right? Or were you too busy watching  _ American Werewolf in the Fucking Desert _ ?”

“I was  _ trying _ to figure out what I had--”   
  
“No, of course, it’s  _ just not your fault _ . My naked ass just fell out of the fucking sky!” _  
_ _  
_ “I know it’s my fault! I am not a perv, Rey! You know I want to wait until we’re both ready and I wasn’t trying to watch you or anything, but I fucked up! I knew I messed up at dinner and I didn’t know how and I just--”

“AND DON’T GET ME FUCKING STARTED ON DINNER!”

Her glare is murderous and golden and she’s breathing hard and he might be aroused if his fight or flight instincts weren’t so loud. 

“I am so beyond angry with you that I could actually spit. So you had better have a fucking ass-kicker of a reason why I shouldn’t leave you out here for the coyotes.”

He throws the flowers aside and rises, towering over her.

She jumps back instantly, the hairs on the back of her neck and arms standing straight up, lip curling back over her sharp teeth. 

"Fuck right off with the monster movie bullshit. I’ve seen shifts before. My mother was a fucking wolf, too."   
  
He meets her cold stare with one of his own. "You ever wonder why the pack chose me to be your pet human? How I knew about wolves in the first place? I'm not some dumb kid chasing tail here. Christ, can you give me a little credit?"

Suddenly it hits her, dense and heady in the damp air. How could she have possibly missed it?   
  
His scent. That unspoken language that had attracted her to him in the first place, whispering sweetly into her ear from across her blackjack table at the casino. That invisible part of him that drives her to inhale more deeply when she’s close to him. That gorgeous mix of sandalwood, molasses, and a hint of lemongrass when he's pissed. It's diluted, but it's there.    
  
Wolf.    
  
And then, something just barely there at the very core of the smell.   
  
_ Oh my fucking god, he's an alpha. _   
  
The omega wolf in her whines and howls to roll over and bare her throat, but her pride is still very human and it only allows her to avert her eyes from his face.   
  
"I--I didn't...I didn't know, I'm sorry," she mumbles, hating how soft her voice has turned. She's still pissed at him, dammit. At least she didn't call him "alpha." There'd be no coming back from that blow to her pride.

She glares back up at him. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?”

"Lots of reasons." He holds his hands up in a gesture reminiscent of a shrug and drops his hands hard, slapping his thighs. "Hell, where do I start? You think I wanted to seem like a wolf groupie or something? Like I sought out a monster girl just like dear old ma?"   
  
He crosses his arms.   
  
"My mother and I don't talk anymore, anyway, so yeah, that's a bit of a sore spot itself."

She nudges closer cautiously, still simmering, circling again slowly, breathing deep. Before, she had felt that she couldn’t explain it to him, but she loved his scent. It was warm and comforting and it smelled  _ safe _ , if that was even possible. It pisses her off even more that it’s having a calming effect on her now.   
  
“You don’t smell completely like a wolf,” she mutters peevishly, more to herself than him. “But you do smell like an alpha.”    
  
Fuck. Well there that goes.

"Yeah, my mom was one."    
  
He knows that means something important. He knows from talking with her just the slightest bit about pack life that she is not one. He can tell from her reaction that he, fuck up as he is, has suddenly won some respect from her for reasons he can’t fully comprehend.   
  
But at least she’s not accusing him of being a pervert, or worse. A cinephile.   
  
He runs a hand through his dark hair, scattering more of his scent into the still, early morning air. Her pupils dilate.

_ Shit. _   
  
"I don't tell human girls what I am. Half-am. And when I met you, I didn't tell you because...shit, I figured you knew, and if you didn't, I was hoping like hell..."   
  
It is his turn to put his hands on his hips in frustration. His long fingers rest on the black leather of his belt, drawing her eyes to his tight-fitting jeans.    
  
"I didn't want you pitying me for what I'm not. I was genuinely hoping you'd like me for me. But I've fucked that up, too."

She stops her pacing behind him.

“It’s your turn to give me some credit,” she says lowly. “I was damn sure that you were a full-blood normie and I still wanted you.”   
  
The past tense isn’t lost on him. If he hadn’t already blown it, this might be the final straw for her.

“Wish I was full-blooded anything,” he mumbles.

She resists the urge to nuzzle her face into the space between his shoulder blades, his well-worn t-shirt doing nothing to hide the impressive musculature hidden beneath it. She sighs.

“I think we’re both pretty shit at this whole relationship thing, huh?”   
  
“Speak for yourself. With the exception of threats to maul my various body parts and a lack of telephone skills, you seem to have your shit together. I think.”

Her laugh is dry and brief. “Should’ve spent more time talking, less time sucking face behind the casino.”

His mouth twitches into a slight, sad smile. She doesn’t see. He turns back to face her, but strides past her.   
  
He’s done for. He knows it. He’s only succeeded in digging himself in deeper, and she’s right to end it with him. He can feel his heart crumbling into dust in his chest and he knows he’s going to break down in front of her if he stays any longer. He knows when to cut his losses, or at least he likes to think he does, and now, he determines, is a good time to get away before he makes things worse.   
  
He picks up the flowers and the shirt.    
  
“Let’s talk later. Now’s not a good time. Catch up with your pack.” He nods toward where they had last been heading, then stands frozen in place, unsure what to do with the items in his hands. 

“These are still yours if you want ‘em.”

“Kylo...” She puts her hands up in front of her, inches shy of his chest. She still can’t quite look at him, let alone touch him.

"Look, I'll be seeing you around. We can talk another time.”   
  
_ This is stupid. This whole plan is ridiculous. _   
  
His strides grow as he storms off in the direction of the lone highway, his pickup visible as a little bump of shadow on the horizon.    
  
"I don't know what I was thinking," he mutters.   
  
His legs may be long, but she's got him beat for speed and she's caught up with him in moments, planting herself in his path. She's barely broken a sweat. Her eyes blaze.    
  
"What the fuck is your problem?" she barks. "You wanted to talk, it was urgent, so talk."   
  
He levels the bouquet at her accusingly, a rapier aimed at his opponent. His eyes meet hers.   
  
"I'm sorry, alright? I didn't mean to...break your trust. Or insult you at dinner the other night. I just...I want to make you happy, give you whatever you need to make you, I don’t know,  _ like _ me."   
  
He tosses the shirt on the ground in frustration, scattering a cloud of dust. "I came here to tell you that I give a shit about you, hell, I fucking care so much about you that I'd let you rip my goddamn jawbone off my face if it would just get you to stop hating me. And I'm working on being good enough for you, and now I’m just here making it worse. Because now you know what I am and what I’m not and I wasn’t trying to lie but now I seem like a massive liar and you probably hate me more. Fuck!"   
  
He braces his hands on his knees, pausing to catch his breath. He's angry at himself, and it’s sitting heavy on his lungs.   
  
He came here to do one thing, and he's failing at it, devastatingly. A groan rips through him, and he just stares at his feet.

"I don't hate you, you unbelievable asshole!" she bellows.

She's a good deal shorter than him and she's about as low on the pack totem pole as she can get, but she'll be damned if she's going to let all 6 feet 3 inches of this idiot forget that she's not to be fucked with.

"In point of fact, I like you a lot! Like crazy a lot. I don't even give a damn about the restaurant!...okay, that's a fucking lie, I was embarrassed, but that's on me. You do make me happy! I'm just...I'm shit at showing it, okay? I really, really like you and I'm fucking it up because I don't know how to fucking talk to fucking people. And now I’m yelling at you again even though I’m trying to de-escalate this fucking fight!"

She scrubs her hands over her face again with a frustrated growl.

"But you did a dumb, shitty thing, and I need to know that I can trust you not to do it again. And I wish that you would have talked to me about your background instead of assuming what my feelings were!" She plants her feet in the sandy earth and her hands on her hips again and stares him down like she's a goddamned alpha queen. "You're my boyfriend, Kylo, we're supposed to be a team. We're supposed to have each other's backs." She falters for a moment. “I mean...you’re not pack, but...you’re important to me. And I have to know that you won’t let me down, just like I’m not going to let you down.”   
  
For the first time, he lets himself scan her body, taking in every dip and curve baking in the morning light. She’s fucking radiant, and he’s pissed at himself.   
  
He steps in closer to her, his boots scraping against the ground, the loudest sound for miles.    
  
“You have to know I didn’t want to lie to you. I’ve been lying to myself and everyone around me for years. It’s habit. Or instinct. Self-preservation. Whatever. I hide who I am because it’s how I get by. I lie and hide and hope they don’t hate me when they figure me out. But I don’t want to be like that anymore.”   
  
He swallows the lump in his throat.   
  
“I want to be better. Hell, I’d settle for being good. I’m a coward. I suck at a lot things, but when I’m around you...I want to be honest from now on. That’s really why I came here. Because I want to apologize for being a dumbass, yes, and to tell you the truth, because I’m trying to be better. I want to change. For you.”

Her expression and posture soften and she fixes her eyes on the fabric of his t-shirt as he approaches. There is a hole in the hem of his left sleeve and she reaches out to rub the soft jersey between her fingertips, poking her pointer finger through the little hole. She is achingly careful not to brush his skin.    
  
"Don't do it for me," she mumbles. "You shouldn't be doing it for me. You should be doing it for yourself, or because it's right, or, I don't know, you had a peyote dream about it, whatever." She sighs and he can feel the heat of her breath through the thin fabric. "My point is that I don't want you to try to change yourself for the wrong reasons and resent me for it later."

She flicks her eyes back up to his face and her heart starts to defrost at the earnestness in his gaze. The sleeve of his t-shirt is coiled tightly around her finger now.   
  
"I don't want you to hate me either."

He has forgotten the wolf with the golden eyes. He only sees the girl, her pelt shed, her body heat caressing his skin. He wants to feel her beneath his hands. He grips the bouquet tighter, the cellophane crinkling.

"I don't love me enough to hate you for doing away with the awful parts." He speaks slowly, carefully. He's not a good talker either.

"Look, maybe I am just a dumb wolf groupie. Maybe I've been spending my whole life wondering why I couldn't have been more like my super cool wolf mom than my normal dad. But you...No matter what, you’re  _ something _ to me. I'm amazed by everything you are and what you can do."

His eyes caress her cheek. She is not a monster girl. She is a desert nymph. She is wrapping him around her finger. She has been since he moved to take over his uncle's old general store. Since he wandered into the small casino after closing time. Since he put way too much money down on a game he didn't know how to play just to see her smile. Just to wait for her to get off work to ask for her name.

Since he took her to dinner and walked her home, and heard the howls. He decided then and there that he would do anything to be in her world, human as he was.

Something about her, the wild, feral pieces of her, calls to a hidden instinct, carved in his bones by fang.

"I won't hate you. I can't."

He can almost see his breath raise the flesh on her neck. His jeans feel tight. Too tight.

Rey wants to drown in his scent; he's so close and he smells so damn good. This close to the full moon (he really did cut it terrifyingly down to the wire but thank god for waxing gibbous), her instincts are extra lupine and right now her human pride needs to step aside and let the dogs do the talking.    
  
Her head tilts up and she rises onto her tiptoes and nuzzles her face up under his chin, a bit prickly after a few days (had he forgotten to shave?) but warm and right and Kylo and every stupid thing they'd been arguing about rolls off her like water. She might be a wolf, but she's  _ purring _ like a goddamned housecat from being this close to him; a warm happy noise radiating from the base of her throat.   
  
He again fumbles with what to do with his hands. He’s frightened suddenly in a way he can’t express. She smells like the earth and the desert and sunrise and since when did sunrise have a scent? He has a beautiful naked woman, a goddess of rage and love at the same damn time, pressing herself against him and he’s not sure what to believe.   
  
The alpha scent, he remembers.   
  
Part of him wishes it had never come up. He had hoped he could love this girl, really be something to her besides a scent, a presence that unlocks something carnal, ancestral for her. But her hair tickles his jaw and her nose brushes against his adam’s apple and  _ fuck _ . He can’t ignore the howling in his bloodstream and the moonlight in his muscles and tendons that are half-cursed and his fingers find the base of her skull and twirl into her hair and he kisses her hungrily, flowers forgotten in the dust as he pulls her to him.   
  
She moans into his mouth, feeling freer than a full-moon hunt and yet safer than the den could ever be. Her eyes roll back when his tongue snakes against hers and her last coherent brain cell waxes poetic about the tastescentfeelsound _ heat _ of him. The faint vestigial rumble of a growl builds in his abdomen and vibrates through her naked skin, the nerve endings still so new and freshly reformed and responsive to the slightest tremor. He’s like a thunderstorm on the desert’s horizon and the animal in her has always thrilled at the onset of dark weather. 

As the last vanguard of sense falls away into desire and instinct, she realizes that, even though he tastes and smells and feels  _ wolfwolfalphawolf _ , she loves the humanness of him too. She’s kissed other wolves before and scented enough for a lifetime, but this one...

That sandalwood and molasses scent is there, of course, and decadent on her tongue as the lemongrass fizzles in her sinuses, but it’s not all wolf and not all human. She can’t quite tease apart the notes enough to tell which smells belong to which species. 

And she finds that she doesn’t give even close to a single fuck. 

All that matters is that this...this is Kylo. All him. Uniquely him. Lineage be damned, species be damned, and fuck every nature versus nurture debate in between. All that matters is that  _ Kylo _ has his hands on her skin,  _ Kylo _ has her pressed tight against his body,  _ Kylo _ is the one kissing her stupid. 

She hums and drags her nails, not claws, up his neck and through his hair.

His hands drop to her sides, feeling the dip of her waist and the strong muscles of her sides and his hands curl and uncurl to feel her skin, and he almost thinks he can feel goosebumps on her skin despite the arid heat already permeating the air. He has only touched her like this through clothing and if she doesn't give a shit that she's not wearing a stitch, then neither will he. Her mouth on his tastes like juniper and night winds and the satisfaction of being sated and if that's anything like he smells to her, he is blindingly grateful for his mother's gift of his half-breeding. He loves the gentleness with which she takes his lips in her teeth and tugs hungrily.

His broad palms find her ass and he hoists her onto him and she pulls her legs around his waist, holding him in her grasp, a climbing vine enveloping him, her hips brushing the straining in his jeans greedily.

If he'd known forgiveness felt this good he might have fucked up harder sooner.

His mind drifts, lost in her, in the happy little whimpers and groans that are emitted every time their mouths part for even the slightest second to breathe, and he doesn't hear the scratching of another set of feet, human, on the dirt around them.

Her nose is full of Kylo’s scent, but the blood rushing in Rey’s ears has never deterred her preternaturally sharp hearing before. She breaks the kiss with a growl, climbing down her boyfriend’s hot, and rather aroused, body.    
  
Kylo’s knowledge of wolf behavioral patterns tells him that if her ears could flatten they would and if she had any hackles to raise they’d be standing straight up.    
  
She whirls with a snarl to face the interloper only to freeze with a whimper and a subtle but noticeable shrinking of her body.    
  
“Poe,” she whispers. “Alpha, I—.”   
  
The man silences her with a raised hand. His face, handsome and symmetrical with dark eyes, commands quiet authority that even Kylo can’t help but feel.    
  
Rey’s mouth snaps shut and she draws her long hair over her shoulder, baring her neck to the other wolf. It’s a submissive gesture that Kylo recognizes from the times other wolves had come over to the house seeking out his mother’s guidance when he was young. It’s a sign of respect and deference to a higher ranking pack member.    
  
He finds that he hates seeing Rey’s version of it, especially when directed towards the other man.

“What the hell did I just catch you doing?” Poe asks, nostrils flaring, eyes aflame with rage. He takes a step forward. “You know to meet us at the den at sunrise if you break off from the pack. It’s now fucking morning. So I had to drive out here to find you, and what? I get to watch you acting like a bitch in heat with a goddamn human. You’re not a fucking pup, Rey. You know better.”   
  
There is a layer of sweat on his tanned, bare chest, his shirt slung over his shoulder. Rey seems so small before him. Kylo can’t help but notice how she seems to cower between the two clothed men.

She flinches at the tone of his voice and her head dips lower, exposing more of her slender neck. Her cheeks are on fire, and she’s never felt more naked in her entire life.    
  
“I’m sorry, Poe, I didn’t realize how late it was, it won’t happen again,” she stammers, her eyes downcast. “Thank you for coming to find me, alpha. I’m unworthy of your generosity.”   
  
A dry desert wind rustles from behind them, wafting the scent of angry lemongrass over the three of them.   
  
“Like hell you didn’t know how late it was. You have eyes, don’t you? You might not know how this whole pack thing works, but the rules are here to keep us safe. All of us. You can run around getting into shit all you want. But the minute you jeopardize the pack’s safety, you need to either get in line or get running, because you’re a liability and not welcome on our territory anymore.”   
  
He turns away from the cowering woman. 

"And you."    
  
Poe turns his smoldering glare on Kylo. Kylo doesn't flinch.   
  
"Just because you're our new daywalker doesn't mean you get to hang around us. Your uncle has had an agreement with the pack. We will honor the agreement with his successor. You will not see clemency should you continue to meddle with pack affairs."   
  
Poe strides over to the two of them with an authoritative gait, and Kylo briefly feels like a guilty high schooler who was just caught making out in the janitor's closet while skipping gym. But when he sees the other man approaching, an instinct he can only assume is his lupine half kicks in.   
  
As the other man reaches for her wrist, Kylo side-steps in front of Rey, putting his arm in front of her as if to shield her.   
  
Poe narrows his eyes, and again his nostrils flare.   
  
"Is this how you want to die?"

Kylo instantly feels his pulse in throat, but he does not back down.   
  
As a child, he watched his mother shift from their back porch. She would disrobe and walk out into the woods. He couldn't forget the faint sounds of her bones breaking and reforming as her body changed shape. His eyes would never break from the forest, until the large chestnut creature that was his mother would emerge moments later.   
  
His father would hold onto him and whisper in his ear, "No matter what, don't meet her eyes. She loves you, kid, but instinct takes over. It'll look like a challenge."   
  
He knows better. But he meets Poe's stare.

Rey’s head snaps up, her eyes darting between the two men. Actual fear, something she hasn’t had to feel since she’s been with the pack, courses sharply through her veins. But not for her. She’s terrified for him. She stares up at Kylo, his jaw clenched and his eyes blazing, and her heart stops.    
  
“What are you doing?” she hisses.    
  
This is wrong, but she can’t convince her feet to move. She puts a hand on his arm, the muscles beneath his skin thrumming with restrained energy. Poe’s lip curls back over slowing lengthening teeth. She’s about to watch her boyfriend get his throat ripped out.    
  
“It’s not worth it, Kylo. Please.”

He breaks Poe's stare to look down at Rey, the spirited gold in her eyes fading to a solemn amber. He remembers just how she looked mere moments ago when she had her hands on her hips glaring at him, naked as the day she was born and standing tall as if she owned the entire desert. Now she is cowering to a man who barely deserves to know her.   
  
Kylo learned pack politics from his mother, but he doesn't give a shit for the practicalities of them. He doesn't see a powerful wolf and pack leader keeping an omega in order; he sees a man bullying the woman he loves.   
  
He hasn't told her that part yet. Perhaps because he is just realizing it in this moment.   
  
But he knows that being brave doesn’t mean being foolish. And he has been enough of a fool for one day. Clenching his hands into fists, he lowers his arm, and with a quick but tender pat on the top of Rey's head, he steps away.   
  
"Sorry," he whispers, backing up.

She exhales after what feels like ages. She slips her fingers around his hand and squeezes fiercely for a brief moment.    
  
He was willing to fight for her.  _ Her _ . A no-name omega wolf with a bad temper and a chip on her shoulder the size of Red Rock Canyon. It makes her feel strong. It makes her feel safe. It makes her feel loved.    
  
Huh. Well doesn’t that change the color of the world...   
  
She leaves her hand on his and stands at his side, hazarding a look back at Poe, no matter how much it makes her instincts riot against themselves.

Poe's ire transfers from Kylo to Rey like electricity travelling along their joined hands.   
  
"Omega. Come. Now." His growl makes the air around them tremble, darkening the early morning glow.   
  
Kylo gives her hand a squeeze. "Go ahead," he whispers, stroking her hair with his free hand again. "It will be alright."

She lets go of his hand reluctantly and steps carefully toward Poe. Every last hair on her body is prickling with adrenaline. She sweeps her hair over her shoulder again as she approaches, eyes down and face passive as she presents her throat.   
  
"Alpha," she murmurs.

"Atta girl." His words are soft. His tone could cut through rock. He grabs her by the forearm and yanks her to him roughly. She stands close to him, so close Kylo knows he can feel her warmth and he has to bite his nails into his palms so the jealousy doesn't override his sense and he tackles the wolf. Not for his own sake. For hers.   
  
Poe pulls his discarded shirt over his shoulder with a flourish and starts to shake it out. "Now put some fucking clothes on. Any tourists come out hiking this way and we're all fucked, because you didn't--"   
  
His nostrils flare again, and he freezes. The shirt goes limp in his hand.    
  
He wraps his hand around the back of Rey's head and pulls her to him, inhaling the scent of her hair.   
  
His eyes go wide.

She tenses in his grip, trying not to look back at Kylo and make everything worse.   
  
"Poe?"

"When the fuck were you with another alpha?" His voice is cold, distant. It is soft, but in its quietness, it is menacing. Terrifying.   
  
The desert freezes for a moment. 

He can smell an alpha’s touch nested in her hair, the sweat and oil acrid and unagreeable to his nose.   
  
"Tell me!" he bellows, gripping her by the shoulders and screaming into her face.    
  
Kylo knew what the fuck he was doing. Stroking her hair with his palms slick with sweat, he knew exactly the shit he was about to start. But he wanted Poe to know that Rey wasn’t his to bully.   
  
"Let go of her." Kylo steps forward. "It's me. She was with me."   
  
Poe considers him. His eyes are black. His teeth are growing again. His breath is hot.    
  
"And what. The fuck. Are you?"

"Kylo, go. Please, just go, I'll be okay," she whimpers, wincing from Poe's fingers digging into her shoulders. She can feel his nails start to sharpen into claws against her flesh and tears prickle at the corners of her eyes. "Go, baby, please."

Her bare skin is getting absolutely coated in dust, and her feet are barely touching the ground now, and Kylo feels his heart shattering.    
  
Rey is a beautiful girl. Her smile is big and loving and full of life, but not easily won. And he had earned it with some easy banter over a few games of Blackjack and won it over and over again with kisses on her neck and jaw that made her laugh and laugh until tears came out of her eyes and with silly dinners in the shop long after he had closed for the night, a candle and the fluorescent glow of the Coca-Cola cases as their only light, their dinner made with hope and maybe too much garlic.    
  
She is tougher than the wilds that forged her. She is brighter than the harvest moon. He would never stand to see her treated like this. He didn't give a shit how she smelled to anyone.   
  
"I am Kylo Ren. I'm nephew of the last daywalker, Luke."    
  
His words are chosen carefully.   
  
"You might know me as Ben Solo. My mother was pack alpha many years ago. My grandfather was alpha before her. My father is a human."   
  
He holds out his hand, raising it, veins standing out as lines of shadow on his flesh in the early morning.   
  
"I am human. But I have the blood of generations of alphas, too. She figured it out. Can't you?"

Poe tightens his grip on Rey's shoulders.   
  
"Are you challenging me, you fucking dog? You domestic fucking pet? Is that what you want?" He seems to shake her with each word, spittle flying.   
  
Kylo shifts uncomfortably, putting his hands up, now a man, wolfishness cast desperately aside.    
  
"No...no. Just put her down. Please."

Rey can feel stinging little rivers of blood inching down her arms and back where Poe's claws have pierced her skin. She bites back a yelp when he shakes her for good measure before dropping her and rounding on Kylo (Ben?). Her legs puddle underneath her and she drops to her knees, eyes wild as she watches the alpha stalk toward her boyfriend. Fucking shit, why couldn't she move?

Kylo notes that Poe's breath in his face reminds him very much of that of a St. Bernard he knew growing up.   
  
"What's your angle, pooch?" Poe growls. "What do you want with  _ my _ fucking pack? Why did you come here? You think your half-breed ass can just take over?"   
  
"No," Kylo explains calmly. "My uncle left me the shop because he wanted to travel. He told me what you had explicitly outlined about certain duties that came with intermediating between the pack and human society and running a shop on pack territory. I get it."   
  
"Then what the ever-living fuck are you doing with her?" Poe jerks his head at Rey. "What game are you playing at, here..." The name feels like venom on his tongue, and he spits it out. " _ Solo _ ."   
  
"She's my girlfriend," he says, throwing his shoulders back as confidently as he can. This is the first time he has uttered the phrase to anyone beside Rey. He loves how it tastes. "No games. No angles. We had a fight, and I came here to make it up to her. It's my fault she was late. I held her up."

"Poe, please," she says hoarsely, anything to draw him off of Kylo. "Leave him alone. I'm the one you're angry with, please just leave him be. He's not a threat to the pack, I swear it."   
  
Omega though she may be and even on her knees, Rey is a proud woman. Which is why it burns the human part of her brain to bend forward at the waist and press her forehead against the ground, spreading her arms in surrender. Even bowed this low, this debased, she can't bring herself to regret it. She's doing her damnedest to keep him safe. This kind, ridiculous, brave, giant of a man who she hopes she'll be able to call hers after this. She's doing this for him.   
  
"I'm begging you, alpha."

Poe looks down his nose at her, scowling. At the moment, she's worth less than the dust she's cowering on. His sights are set for the interloper. How could old man Luke have done this? He had to have known.

"They snip your balls, huh, pup? Or does she have a vice grip on them?" Poe sneers. "You're Leia's bastard mutt. We know all about you, kid. And if you think you're going to be treated like an alpha because your bitch mom was one, you don't know how the fuck things work around here."

He steps in closer, eyes cold and calculating on the half-alpha's face. Kylo can feel the heat radiating off him, simmering heat. Rage. "And I'm not afraid to show you. You step out of line, your uncle better hope he has another heir to run his damn shop. Because we won't hesitate to protect what's ours."

He spits on the ground at Kylo's feet. He picks up his discarded shirt and tosses it on Rey's prone form lazily. "Get dressed."   
  
She recoils from the garment where it lands on her, sitting up on her haunches. She examines the shirt for a moment, passing the flannel over her hands. It smells all wrong. How hadn't she noticed that before? It's not a bad smell, per se, just...wrong. Too sweet and too spicy at the same time. It burns her nose.

Her gaze travels over the dirt until she finds Kylo's boots, the black leather turned dusty red-brown. Her eye follows the line of his legs up his body, noting the tension coiled in his muscles, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. Then she finds his face. He's looking at her with his heart in his eyes and it makes her own heart flip over a few times. He gives her a tired, crooked smile and a wink as he shoves his hands into his pockets.

Rey rises slowly, not bothering to brush the dirt from her face or legs. Dusty streaks of blood score down her back like wings stripped of their feathers. The tilt of her chin is proud, but she keeps her eyes down as she walks past Kylo. She crouches gracefully and picks up the oversized t-shirt he had brought her, pressing it to her nose. It is just a plain white shirt, covered in desert grime. But it smells like him. And that's all that matters.

She slips into it, the hemline hitting her at mid-thigh and the "short" sleeves reaching her elbows. She's adjusting it as she sidles up to him and presses a quick kiss against his bicep. His eyes have been on her the whole time. She looks up at him and grins that gorgeous, luminous, nose-crinkling smile and he just about falls in love with her all over again.   
  
Poe sneers as he picks his shirt back up and slips it on. He casts another withering gaze on Kylo.   
  
"You may think you smell like an alpha, pooch, but don't forget your place. If you don't shift, you're a human. That's all you'll ever be."   
  
He turns on his heel and raises a hand. "Pack meeting, omega. You're late. Let's go."   
  
Kylo feels a small hand snake around the back of his neck and suddenly she's dragging his head down to hers for a bruising kiss that ends far too soon for either of them.   
  
"I'll see you soon," she says quietly against his lips.   
  
He watches her go, still feeling her clinging to his skin like the dust on her legs.   
  
He buries his hands deeper in his pockets, watching Poe wrap a protective arm around her shoulders as he guides her to his Jeep.   
  
Ben picks up the dust-covered flowers. The sun is now scattering the early dawn haze and the day is becoming hot.    
  
His eyes follow her until the vehicle is out of sight. He will not stop watching her.

 

* * *

 


	2. Part 2: Full Moon

The storm, always a surprise in these parts, starts just as Kylo pulls up to the mountain. He switches the old black pickup into park and lets the vehicle idle for a moment, watching the heavy drops of rain coat the windshield.

He feels guilty coming out here after her, but he can't stop the churning in his gut. Since he received her voicemail, he has felt as if there was something following him, a gloom he needs to exorcise by any means necessary.

He had been helping a group of elderly tourists in the shop and missed her phone call, but Rey left him a message telling him that she was fine, she wouldn't be by before the shift that night; the pack was heading to the mountains for the full moon, and she would be back early the following morning.

She had hesitated at the end of the message. He considered she might have been trying to say something else, but all he heard was a quiet "Thanks for everything this morning. Really," before the call ended.   
  
He climbs out of the truck and is almost immediately soaked. The mountains are frigid and steely gray under the cloud-filtered light of the full moon. Each raindrop seems electrically charged as it hits his skin. Rain is rare in this area, but this kind of storm is rarer still. 

Half-breed though he is, the soaked air amplifies every smell and wet dog and juniper and  _ Rey _ hits his nose and sticks in his nostrils. The cold wind buffets him and molds his T-shirt to his body. He follows her trail blindly through the rock formations. 

Instinct is his guide tonight. Maybe it’s the moon. Maybe it’s her. 

It takes him probably hours on his human legs to find them. He’s soaked to the bone, his feet are uncomfortably soggy and probably blistered from the water rubbing at his skin on the difficult hike, but he keeps searching. 

He had left his flashlight in the truck. He doesn’t need it.

He knows he’s close when he hears the snarls and a pained yelp that is all too familiar. The sound pierces him like a bolt through the chest and suddenly he’s running faster than he ever has in his life. 

He bursts into the outcropping to find the pack, full-pelted and howling, circled around two wolves. One is huge and blacker than pitch with hard, dark eyes; its lip is pulled back over sharp teeth, and its tail is standing straight up. The other is small and slight, tawny fur turned dark copper from the rain and unfocused eyes the color of tarnished gold. She is panting, and she is limping.

She’s hurt.

 

She thought she could trust the pack.   
  
It was the one thing she had believed unquestioningly her whole life. After years on the run from humankind who didn’t want her and dodging familial packs who hunted her off her territory, she had hoped this would be it. Her chance at a good life. A future.   
  
Legends of this pack had spread to her from the kinder wolves she encountered. A pack in Nevada that accepted strays and loners, welcomed them, even. The pack ran the Resistance, a casino frequented by locals and truckers passing through the area. The Resistance was almost exclusively staffed by wolves, and for Rey, that meant an opportunity to thrive in human society, where she had been shunned since she was a pup. Child. Whatever.   
  
Well, the rumors had been true...once. Things had changed since then, and the pack was far less accepting by the time she arrived. But through Finn, a friendly beta, she was given an audience with the alpha, Poe. She plead her case well: she was resilient and clever and would be a worthy addition to the pack. He heard her plea, and allowed her one full moon to run with them. An audition of sorts.

They loved the tawny omega, the scrappy orphan, immediately, and Poe let her stay.

A pack.  _ Her _ pack. Finally.   
  
The moment she was accepted, she had fallen into line. After years as a survivalist with no one looking out for her, the sudden embrace of a group had made her rethink her ways of approaching the world.   
  
It was no longer about simply living day to day. It was about thriving so the pack could thrive.    
  
And she hadn’t had reason to question them.   
  
Until tonight.

The decision to go to the mountains hadn’t sounded suspicious to Rey. In all her months with them, she hadn’t been given any reason to question the motives of the pack. This was a special full moon, the Harvest Moon. Why not go out to explore near Moapa Peak?   
  
After leaving Kylo a quick voicemail, one she hoped conveyed emotions she hadn’t yet learned how to express, Rey and a bunch of other lower ranked pack members loaded into Finn’s van without a second thought, the rickety old vehicle racing the setting sun. The pack arrived with just enough time to undress before the shift overtook them, and with a few growls, Poe commanded them into the mountains to begin the hunt.

She enjoyed the rocks beneath her paws. Climbing allowed her to truly test her newly formed muscles. A storm was in the air; she liked the taste of the moisture and the lightning on her tongue.   
  
Then with a sharp howl, Poe called them to order.

Rey hadn’t expected the conversation to turn to her.

To her, and to the pack’s new daywalker and secretkeeper. To her boyfriend.

The discussion had turned sour fast.   
  
She had dodged an uncomfortable recap of her encounter with Poe after she returned to the den that morning, the cottage reserved for the alpha and used for assembling the pack in their human forms. However, when they gathered up near the peak of the mountain, the alpha reminded everyone, through snarls and growls, how Rey’s recklessness was an exact model of what good pack members Should Not Do.   
  
The wolves had snapped their disapproval at her. She lowered her head, her ears, her tail, rolled over, exposed her throat, her belly. She tried to apologize. But it was not good enough.   
  
Her pride flared to life.   
  
And it was all downhill from there.

 

Kylo freezes. His human mind screams at him to run back down the mountain and don’t look back, but his alpha eyes see the woman he loves, injured and afraid. He sees beneath the fur and lupine features.   
  
He sees only Rey.    
  
He can hear the black wolf snarling in what might be an accusatory tone.   
  
He swallows and steps forward.   
  
“Leave her.”   
  
His voice is more commanding than even he had ever heard it, and all heads turn to him. Several wolves on the fringe of the circle, omegas mostly, pick up his scent, and retreat in deference.   
  
Many raise curious heads as a riddle washes through their minds:   
  
_ What smells like an alpha, but doesn’t shift under a full moon? _   
  
Poe growls a warning. Far kinder than the interloper deserves, but murdering your daywalker in front of the whole pack is generally considered uncouth, no matter how brashly the human is behaving.   
  
Kylo’s eyes scan Rey’s, dull from pain and fear.   
  
But she knows him. Relief floods her and if she had the right physical makeup to laugh, she would. His scent is warmth and love and safety and  _ mate _ . He shouldn’t be here.    
  
_ Run! _ she barks at him.  _ Not safe! Mate not safe! _   
  
He doesn’t understand, his ears don’t hear the right language.    
  
_ Mate?! _ snarls Poe.  _ Stupid bitch! Mate with that dog? Half-breed! Waste! Trash! Not wolf, not alpha, not worthy! _   
  
She sees him lunge for Kylo before her mate’s half-human eyes can catch it. With a howl, she launches herself in front of him, straight into Poe’s path. Her hackles raise and her eyes burn brilliant gold and her teeth glint silver in the drowned moonlight.    
  
_ MY MATE! _ she screams.  _ MINE! _

As the animal pushes him aside, Kylo loses his footing and falls hard against the slick rock beneath him. He sees the tawny wolf limp as she places herself between him and Poe.

_ You die for mutt? _ Poe snarls contemptuously.  _ Stupid omega. Worthless. _

Kylo scrambles to sit upright, looking at the large black wolf towering over him.

He can't understand the grunts and barks passing between the wolves, but he knows it's about him.

He knows he should be afraid, but the lupine part of him remains resolute. He knows Rey needs him. He wouldn't have come out here for anything else, except he knew that she was in danger.

He had to protect her, just as she was protecting him.

“Rey, please,” he begs, his voice slight beneath the thundering growl of the alpha and the retreating storm around them.

Hearing her name, her human name, on his lips sends a jolt through her. Could he see? Could he really  _ see _ her, underneath all of the fur and the fangs and the blood?    
  
Love is a human emotion. But it makes her wolf heart sing nonetheless.    
  
She turns her head back to look at her Kylo. He can see every emotion in her eyes. He knows.    
  
Poe had fought hard for his position. He had bested a powerful alpha in combat and had led  _ his _ pack successfully for years. He is a strong leader and a worthy alpha. He had not come this far by allowing sentiment to cloud his judgment. He takes his advantages when they present themselves.    
  
Rey howls in pain as she feels iron jaws sink into the back of her neck. The black wolf drags her away from the man and her vision swims.   


 

The full moon had always been an interesting phenomenon for Kylo.   
  
As a young child, it meant hugging his mother at sundown, climbing into bed, and from his window seeing her vanish into the night while his father kept watch for her.   
  
As he got older, he joined the watch, but with very distinct rules. Keep your distance. Don’t make eye contact. Make sure she’s safe. Make sure she comes home. He usually fell asleep in his rocking porch chair, and was put to bed by his father before the sun came up. As he got older, he was able to keep watch all night.   
  
He had hoped in his teen years that the change would come to him. Starting on his first full moon after his fourteenth birthday, he would follow his mother towards the woods, keeping a careful distance. 

She would leave her robe on a particular stone at the edge of the forest. He would follow her in his underwear, and wait by the rock, trying to feel the full moon in his blood.   
  
Maybe this month.   
  
Maybe this night.   
  
Years passed.   
  
The full moon meant shivering in the cold, his gangly arms crossed over his thin chest as the winter air nipped at his skin. The full moon meant getting eaten alive by mosquitos during the summer, welts raised in places they  _ really  _ shouldn’t be. Thorns and briars in his bare feet. Waiting for an hour or more, just in case. Just to be safe.   
  
His mother no longer tried to coach him through the change.   
  
Either it would happen soon, or it wouldn’t.   
  
His seventeenth birthday was the night of a full moon. After he finished his slice of birthday cake, his mother kindly told him to stay in tonight.    
  
The time had passed. The gift was not his.   
  
He was always painfully ordinary. Now even more so.   
  
As his father grew older, more tired, Kylo took over the watch at midnight. But every month, his bitterness seethed through him.   
  
One night, as his father came to join him after the two men switched, they heard the growling coming nearer. Kylo -- then called Ben -- rose to his feet and grabbed the shotgun by the door.   
  
“Don’t go out there, kid. She’s not herself,” his father warned.   
  
Kylo didn’t listen. That was the wolf in him: irritable, stubborn, and averse to sage advice, even if it would save his skin.    
  
As the large wolf approached the house, Kylo bolted out to meet her.    
  
His father had warned him for years not to look the wolf in the eyes.   
  
The wolf was his mother. Those warm brown eyes were his own.

He met her stare, and didn’t see his mother there.

She whirled on him before he could level the shotgun at her.

His father leapt between them, trying to protect his son.   
  
The mother’s claw met the son’s face, but the father took the brunt of the damage from her teeth.   
  
His father died because of him. Because he had been foolish on the full moon.

He held his father as the sun rose.   
  
His mother came limping out of the forest, put on her robe, and her bloodied, tear-streaked face examined what was left of her family.

“Ben, what have you done?”

 

As an adult, the full moon became a reminder of what he was. Of what he was not.   
  
But now he faces down what he could never become, and he feels a strange relief that he is not them.

Kylo scrambles to his feet and stands taller, straighter than he had before.   
  
He feels the light of the full moon on his skin, and in it, and through it, coursing through his bloodstream.   
  
He feels the call of the night, the primal howl.

He is not a wolf. He is something else entirely.

“Let her go,” he growls.

At once his boots are too tight and his clothing too confining, but he does not break them. His fingers are claws as he looks down at them and every hair on his body is standing on end.   
  
His teeth are elongating  and he can feel them, sharp and angular against his lips and gums.   
  
Still holding Rey firmly in his jowls, Poe whips his head back to Kylo, to the strange human-wolf hybrid standing on the cliff face.   
  
Much of the pack had turned away, unable to face this strange monstrosity. But a few still looked on.   
  
“ _ LET HER GO _ ,” he roars, his voice a strange mix of human and animal, a mangled cry ripping through the mountainside.

Poe's black eyes regard him, calculating. Nervous? Terrified. This is no human. This yellow-eyed half-breed is an abomination. A true monster.    
  
He tosses the omega aside with a jerk of his massive head. Her body, limp like a stuffed animal, hits the rock wall with a sickening thud and a weak whine escaping her throat. Rey slumps to the ground, and lays frighteningly still.   
  
Poe returns his cold gaze to the monster before him, blood and spit dripping from his teeth.   
  
_ You will never shift, dog, _ Poe growls.  _ Never be wolf. _   
  
Suddenly the growls and snarls Kylo hadn't understood before come to his mind clear and real as if Poe's human voice was leaving that hideous maw.

Kylo curls forward into a crouch, a rumble building in his chest. His fingers twitch, strangely heavy now with the new weight of dagger-sharp claws. His eyes never leave Poe’s. The challenge is evident. 

“I may not be a wolf, but at least I’m more of a fucking man than you,” Kylo growls. 

Poe howls, enraged, and flies at him, jaws open wide and gaping. 

Ben Solo remembers jaws like this. He remembers teeth like chef’s knives sinking into flesh, tearing muscle from bone, blood on the grass, blood soaking his dad’s shirt, blood in his eye, blood on his mother’s mouth. Ben Solo screams inside of him, saltwater tears stinging the open wound on his face and neck, crying for the mother he let down, for the father he let die. 

The boy cowers. The man remains. 

Kylo is ready this time. He won’t let anyone hurt his girl ever again. He can almost taste the blood in his own mouth. He pulls his arm back, ready to strike. 

A russet blur barrels into Poe’s flank with a wild shriek, knocking the other wolf off his trajectory. There is an air-splitting crack as Poe’s head collides with the rock just beyond the circle. A tremor ripples through the pack, and they wince at the sound.   
  
Rey rises to her feet, breathing ragged and favoring her front right leg. She backs up and presses herself tight to Kylo’s leg. Fur wet with rain and blood stands on end and she snarls at her pack’s alpha.    
  
Poe lies still for a moment. Rey’s sides heave from exhaustion, from the pain in her broken body. Kylo tentatively puts a clawed hand on her haunches, calming her. Claiming her.   
  
The alpha stirs, blood dripping into his eyes from a crack in his skull.   
  
He staggers to his feet. Kylo involuntarily steps back, but Rey remains pressed to him.   
  
The betas and a few other omegas stagger to Poe’s aid, whimpering and nudging him to help him rise. He growls commands to step away.

He levels his gaze on Rey.   
  
_ This how you treat pack,  _ he snarls.  _ Pack took omega in. Omega destroys pack. _

Kylo’s hand tightens on Rey’s fur.

“She’s a fucking  _ person _ ,” he growls. “You treat her like trash, not family. What kind of pack is this?”   
  
He stands straighter. “This is not the pack my mother lead. She wanted everyone to have a place where they were cared for, not hurt. Leia Organa-Solo left this pack, but she still taught me the importance of family. You’re all each other has and you brought her here to  _ die _ ?”   
  
Poe staggers forward.

_ NOT YOUR BUSINESS _ , he snaps. 

“Oh, but it is,” Kylo roars back over the rain. “I’m your daywalker. Your community is mine, too. I make sure you’re all able to fit in. Be human. And this? The way you treat her? That’s not human at all.”

Rey growls quietly in agreement, eyes trained on Poe, but starting to glaze over.    
  
_ Better...outcast than...abused _ , she pants. She leans her head against Kylo's thigh, suddenly drained of the adrenaline that had propelled her moments before. He is warm and he smells like home. She's so tired.    
  
Poe levels the two of them with a murderous but unsupported glare. He knows he's losing blood fast and that his head needs healing. The half-breed is itching for a fight, and in Poe's current state, the monster might even win. He needs to think of the pack, they can't be left without their leader on a full-moon night without a successor. The bitch is in far worse condition, though, he thinks with a modicum of triumph. She won't last long. Good riddance.   
  
He straightens slowly and stalks around in a small circle, shaking the blood from his eyes.    
  
_ Leave now, half-breed. _ The black wolf turns his glare on the lump of wet brown fur that is Rey.  _ Take your omega bitch mate with you. _   
  
He barks a few orders to the pack and the wolves begin to slink away into the mountains.

Kylo feels Rey’s body start to give out, and he carefully places his other hand on her side, slowly enough so that she doesn’t lash out at him by mistake. Her ribs heave beneath his fingers, as if she has been running for miles. He slowly lowers her to the ground, his hands soothing on her, as if they are holding her together.   
  
He feels his teeth begin to recede and his claws retract back into his nail beds and his skin suddenly feels more comfortable, as if the rain was loosening the tightened skin cells. In moments, it is as if he had never felt the ancestral curse tainting half his blood. He is human again, an ordinary man, kneeling on a mountain and clutching a wounded wolf to him.   
  
It is in that moment that Poe’s words come back to him.   
  
Mate. He and Rey hadn’t had a chance to discuss where they stood in their relationship since their uncomfortable date the other night and their subsequent blow out this morning, but clearly the conversation had happened when he couldn’t understand wolf-speak.   
  
_ Mate _ . He curls his fingers in Rey’s fur. He likes how that sounds. Is that how she feels?   
  
She's breathing hard, her eyes rolling in her skull, delirious now that the pain is coming back to her in full force. She snaps weakly at the human hand on her bloodied flank.

_ Hurts _ , she whimpers.  _ Let me die, daywalker. _

The scent of blood is drowning out everything else. She knows that this kind of death is inevitable for a wolf like her, a disobedient omega, a nameless orphan, but that doesn't make it hurt any less. Where is her mate? Where is that warm, safe smell now when she needs it the most?

She whines piteously, and Kylo could swear on the sinking moon above that he hears his name.   
  
He strokes her fur, trying to calm the frantic, scared animal beneath his hands, trying to soothe the girl within.   
  
“I’ve got you, Rey,” he murmurs. “You’re safe now. I’ll get us out of here, okay?”   
  
He knows better. He almost died the last time. She could very well still snap and bite and kill him right this second. His father warned him, his mother warned him. He didn’t listen, and he paid with his family.   
  
It was only him and Rey now. He would risk it for her.   
  
He shifts himself out away from the wolf’s back, and crawls on his knees towards her head.    
  
“Rey?” he asks, tentative. “Look, I know you’re in pain, baby. I know it’s hard to hear me over the moon, but please. You’re hurt. I can carry you. I can get us out of here. I just need you to trust me, okay?”   
  
His eyes wander up her snout to her hazy golden eyes, her pupils blown wide from pain. He does not break her stare.    
  
“Will you let me lift you? I won’t hurt you. I promise. I’ll be your pack now, alright?”

The deep brown eyes staring at her are...familiar, and kind and...dammit, why can't she place them? The uncertainty roils in her gut and she growls weakly, as if she can't decide whether to hate this creature or not. That's definitely a familiar feeling.   
  
_ Come on, you dumb dog, _ snarks a low female voice in the very back of her head.  _ Listen. Look closer. Breathe deep. _   
  
She sniffs tentatively, her wolf's nose a hundred times keener than her freckly human one. Around the blood, past the wet earth, and the lightning in the air...warmth...sweetness...and earthy sourness. And above all, home.    
  
Mate. Kylo.    
  
She blinks back at him and lolls her head toward his hand where it's braced on the ground. She rubs her cheek against his knuckles, a thin whine squeaking faintly from her.

A surprised laugh bursts out of him.   
  
“Yeah? Rey, you’ll let me carry you?”   
  
He exhales, relief a short-lived visitor in his mind as he figures out how he’s going to carry the wolf down the mountain.    
  
He removes his shirt, and, feeling for the hole in the sleeve, yanks until he is able to tear the wet fabric into large strips. He carefully wraps these around the visible wounds on Rey’s flesh, murmuring gentle words to her as he works. She whimpers, but does not lash out.    
  
“I’ve got you, sweetheart. Don’t worry. We’ll get out of here.” His mantra is probably more for himself than her, he realizes, but he hopes his tone is soothing, regardless.   
  
When her wounds are covered, he slips the remainder of his shirt into his pocket and rises, bending over at the waist. He places one hand along her stomach, the other along her back, and with a quick count-off, he lifts her into his arms and drapes her over his shoulder: the best fireman’s carry he can manage.    
  
She is surprisingly still.    
  
“You’re not alone, Rey. I’m here,” he whispers. “Just stay with me. It’s almost morning.”

Her muzzle drags wearily against his shoulder, an almost-reply.    
  
Her wounds are jostled with every jolting step down the mountain. He’s a strong man, but she’s a densely muscled creature despite her size, so the journey is slow and arduous. The rain continues to pour, trickling thick blood down over Kylo’s chest.    
  
The sky is starting to lighten at the edges by the time they are halfway to his truck.    
  
Rey whimpers quietly. She knows what the softening of the sky means, even in her condition. It means pain. More pain than she thinks she can stand. She starts to wriggle in his grip, trying to escape, to find a dark cave somewhere the sun can’t find her.

His muscles strain to hold the heavy creature. Every cell in his arms and back are burning, struggling to hoist her, and each step makes his legs feel leaden. But he trudges on, until her writhing prevents him from proceeding any further.

The light is shifting in the sky, turning it a watery gray. Kylo knows it’s time. He won’t make the same mistake he made the other day.   
  
He places her on the ground gently.    
  
“It’s okay, Rey,” he croons, stroking her trembling shoulder. “Don’t be afraid. You can shift. I won’t look.”   
  
He removes his hand and turns away, preparing to give her distance. He’ll walk as far as it takes.

A paw scrapes weakly against his arm, freezing him in his tracks. He turns back to look at her and he can see the silent plea in her face.   
  
_ Don't leave me alone for this. Don't hate me, monster that I am. _   
  
She holds him there, body and soul, as the first rays of the sun shimmer across her coppery fur and her heart stops beating.    
  
The shift hits her like a fucking semi. Full moons are the worst. Shifting during the late stages of waxing gibbous and early stages of waning are as easy as taking a step. It’s a choice to change. This transformation is forced upon them, more complete, more savage. More excruciating.   
  
The sound wrenched from her body is chilling, a guttural howl of animal and human agony. Every bone in her body breaks so that it can be reformed again. Every tendon and muscle stretches and shrinks spasmodically to the size and shape of her daylight self. Fangs retreat, claws dull, fingers flex, tail shrinks, fur and skin and flesh rends under the knife of the sunlight. At some point the sounds stop because her vocal cords and lungs are physically reshaping themselves and she can't breathe enough to scream.    
  
Kylo witnesses the transformation with magnetic horror. There is no way she can survive this kind of trauma. He wants to gather her up, this writhing, howling mass of Rey, and hold her impossibly close, take the pain for her. The process had seemed so instantaneous from a distance, almost graceful. His mother had shouldered it with poise and dignity, why wouldn't Rey? 

He realizes then that maybe his mother's silence in her pain had been for her family's benefit. No one wants to know that the person they love the most is in uncontrollable agony every month. It is an intimate pain, a suffering that you don’t want seen, even by your loved ones.

And yet.   
  
And yet it’s _ beautiful _ . There’s a small piece of Kylo’s mind, not lupine, but very human, that is entranced by her change. He sees the gorgeous, powerful wolf becoming the woman he loves and he can’t help but feel captivated. He is astonished by her power, by her willingness to share herself. And the terror at her pain vanishes. He loves her.

Rey's breath returns to her in a shuddering gasp and suddenly, the mountainside is silent again. She lies there, glowing and raw and  _ human _ on the hard ground, the sunrise painting her skin in opalescent shades. Her fragile ribcage heaves from the exertion of a full moon's change. There is a new scar on her right arm, but otherwise, she is miraculously whole.    
  
She turns her head to look up at him with liquid amber eyes.   
  
"Hi," she croaks.   
  
He smiles. He can’t help himself. There was a knot in his chest, a straining in his heart that he hadn’t noticed until now, the moment it is untangled. She is safe, alive, and not ready to murder him for the first time in days. He could shout at the sun in delight.   
  
He moves his hand tentatively to her face, still not entirely sure he is safe from a bite, but she accepts his caress, and his thumb wanders her soft, human cheek.   
  
“Well, hello yourself,” he says with a laugh. “How was your night?”   
  
She is so...relieved. When was the last time she felt happy to be in her human skin? She’s used to the too-small, confining itch of her tiny, weak body. The screaming overstimulation of new nerve endings. The frustration of dulled senses and the agony of remembering true freedom. 

But Kylo’s fingers on her face are soft and gentle. Her skin hums in the swirling patterns of his fingerprints. 

She coughs a weak chuckle, the shadow of her own starry grin twinkling on her lips. 

“Eventful. Yours?”   
  
“I’ve had worse.” He winks. “Care for a lift?”

She smiles fully now. “What a gentleman.” She lifts shaking arms to wrap around his neck.   
  
Scooping up her legs in one arm and wrapping the other around her ribs, he rises to his feet. She feels like a feather in his arms after the wolf he had borne earlier, so weary and strained are his muscles. 

“After dinner the other night? It’s the least I can do.”

Part of him wants to offer her clothing again, give her the tattered shirt balled up in his back pocket, but more than that, he’s determined to not let her be ashamed of who she is, no matter what form she takes. He cradles her close to him, placing kisses on her temple every few feet as he descends down the trail on the mountainside. 

Her skin is warm and dry against his chest, still damp from the night’s downpour as the sun slowly creeps up into the sky and scatters the heavy storm clouds. He could hold her like this indefinitely, never tiring of the press of her against him.  
  
 _Mate._   
  
She doesn’t seem like she’s prepared to tire of him, either.

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, remember when this was supposed to be a oneshot?
> 
> Yeah, me neither.


	3. Part 3: Waning Moon

They are quiet for most of the downhill journey. Rey is coming back to herself, her brain still out of sorts. Memories tend to be a bit fuzzy after the shift; synapses and neurons have to shock themselves back into working order after having spent the last several hours swimming in a completely different brain chemistry. It’s disorienting, but nothing that a long nap and a large bottle of water don’t usually cure after a few hours. It’s always easier to recall the night’s events if she can catch a scent that triggers a memory.

And now she is engulfed in a very distinctive scent. One with many memories attached to it. She remembers him swooping in to her rescue, looking half-drowned with his ears sticking out from under where his long black hair was plastered to his head. She remembers his yellow eyes as he crouched forward, ready to strike. She remembers the fight with Poe and the pain. She shivers involuntarily and clutches just a fraction closer to Kylo’s warmth. 

And she remembers a word being thrown around, a weighty one that should really be handled with more care. Her face flames. Damned dog decided that this enormous creature who wore an apron around his store no matter who might come in, who made faces at babies in strollers as they passed, who couldn’t play Blackjack to save his own damn life, was her mate.

“Um, so we should probably talk about...uh...the m-word,” she mumbles into his neck.   
  
“Muzzle.”   
  
“Motherfucker, I swear to god…”

“Hey, don’t bring my mother into this. Unless ‘mom’ is the word you’re thinking of.”

“MATE, KYLO!” she groans, wriggling again to try to escape his grasp. “Stop being obtuse! I’ve had a very long night!”   
  
His heart rockets into his stomach. Well, so much for that.

“What about it?”

“Please put me down,” she says quietly after a moment.   
  
He resists the urge to be considerably more obstinate by tossing her over his shoulder again, and he sighs, coming to a stop on a flat outcropping to lower her to her feet. He instantly misses her flesh against him, as if he had removed one of his own damn limbs.   
  
What kind of useless pup is he.

She stands shakily, still gripping gingerly at his arms until she finds her balance. She looks up at him and her expression is unfathomable.

“You...you do know what it means, right? For me to...claim you...as my mate.” Her voice is barely above a whisper.   
  
“I guess it’s considerably stronger than boyfriend, huh?”

She smiles softly. “Yeah, you could say that. Wolves mate for life, in case you missed that part of freshman bio.”

Her breath leaves her in a controlled whoosh. “I know it’s a lot.” She scoffs at herself. “Come on, Rey, fucking understatement. It’s  _ really _ kind of a lot. And I know we haven’t been dating long, but--”   
  
“Is that what you want? I mean,” he stammers, his words having hightailed it down the mountain ahead of him. “Would you really want  _ me _ ? I can be a human boyfriend. A daywalker. Half-alpha. Whatever the hell. But...is that enough?”   
  
His hands find his pockets.   
  
He knew something similar had happened with his parents. His mother chose a human mate. It was Not Done. And her pack eventually turned on her when Kylo was born, a wrinkly, pink human child, not old enough to show the moon’s blessing, yet the pack already believed he was not wolf enough, never would be wolf enough.   
  
The loss of her pack devastated his mother. She became a fixture of the lone wolves in their new home in Oregon, with other wolves trekking through the forest on the full moon to seek out the female alpha, and Kylo awoke to strangers at the breakfast table beseeching his parents’ aid and wearing their old, borrowed clothes. Between these visits and her family, it was enough stability for her to be comfortable, if not happy.

But he looked at his father’s eyes as they kept watch those nights. 

They asked the same questions every full moon.  _ Is this enough? _

"Enough? You think...you think you wouldn't be enough...for  _ me _ ? Kylo, I'm caught in between a day job at a casino and a second life as a hundred pound fur ball. How could  _ I _ possibly be enough for  _ you _ ?"    
  
She steps away, she wants to pace, wants to move, wants to expel all this nervous energy stuck in her bones. No, she needs to stand still, look him in the eyes, tell him what she feels.   
  
"I don't want you to feel...tied down to me. You probably know better than anyone how fucking hard it is to be with someone like me. And I don't..." Her voice catches in her throat. "I don't want you to...to be afraid of me. I'm dangerous. A wild animal wearing a person like a costume." A tear slips unbidden down her cheek, carving a path in the dust on her skin.

"You're the best thing in my life right now and it would kill me if I ever hurt you..."

“I do know how it is to be with someone like you. I lived most of my life with someone a lot like you. And if I didn’t want that, want you... if I thought I had any reason to fear you, do you think I would be here right now?”   
  
His eyes scan her face briefly, and his hand gently wipes away the tear falling down her jaw. He can feel her power in his muscles, hear the sounds of her bones breaking and reforming echoing in his ears, and yet here she stands before him, small and fearful and bare, and why should he be the one protecting her?   
  
There was something about his humanity, he realized. Something flawed and fragile and weak yet necessary. She might be attracted to his scent, his essence, his wolfishness, but she could have snapped at him and sent him running at any time.   
  
There had to be something valuable about him, and perhaps it was because he empathized with her. He did not pity her or look down harshly at her for being an omega. He idolized her, worshipped her for being herself. He could never imagine being worthy of being hers, but he was.   
  
“A wild animal in a person costume?” he repeats with a laugh, his voice soft and low. “You’re one of the best people I know. So either I don’t know any good people, or you’re something special. Someone worth fighting for.”

Her face crumples and she hides her eyes in her hand, a soft hiccup bubbles out of her trembling lips. Rey is not a crier. Even at the points in her life when she had hit the very end of rock bottom, she swallowed down the pain, the tears, the bitterness until it fueled her to do better. To survive. No time to cry when you don't know where your next meal is coming from.   
  
But things had changed now. She doesn't have to just survive anymore. And that realization has stolen all of her steel and stubbornness away from her.   
  
"No one's ever cared about me like that before," she sobs quietly, her shoulders shaking. "I--I don't know what to say..."

He steps away from her suddenly and falls to his knees before her. It’s a crude imitation of a gesture he has seen before, but he sweeps his damp black hair aside, exposing his neck to her.    
  
He swallows, his Adam's apple bobbing, and looks up at her, eyes warm with love and apprehension.

Immediately she flies to him, tugging uselessly on his massive shoulders.   
  
"No, no, no, Kylo, don't. Stand up, please, I'm no alpha. You saved my life. I should be the one baring my throat to you." Now that the floodgates are open, the tears course down her cheeks in unstoppable torrents.

He looks up at her, and immediately his heart clenches to see her weeping. He rises, embracing her so tightly and pulling so close, trying to remove the space between them.   
  
“I probably wouldn’t be walking down this mountain if not for you,” he mutters into her ear. “Don’t let the pack tell you you’re anything less than the greatest among them. You’re so much more than they are, than I am, alpha bullshit be damned.”   
  
He buries his nose in her scalp, nuzzling her. “I can’t smell anything wrong with you.”

He brushes a kiss against her earlobe. “And I don’t see a single thing about you that isn’t perfect.”

Rey immediately melts into him. Her hands find his face and she pulls him down to her level and she kisses him and kisses him and kisses him. He tastes like salt and molasses and she can't imagine ever being parted from him. 

So when she breaks away from him, she makes damn sure that she has a good reason. 

"I love you," she whispers, her fingers curling against his jaw. She peers up at him through spiky lashes, her eyes the color of warm honey. "I love you, Kylo."   
  
He feels it. He knows. Deep in his joints and sinews and organs and tissues, there is a feral, moon-touched part of him that knows his heart is safe in this woman’s possession. She would protect it ferociously and treasure it deeply.   
  
“I love you, Rey,” he says, pressing his forehead to hers. He stands quietly with her for a moment, feeling her kisses drying on his lips in the arid morning. Her skin against his is soothing and alluring, calling him, pulling him deeper and deeper into her. He almost doesn’t want to leave the mountain.   
  
“So what all does it mean, being your mate?” he asks, a sly smile playing on his mouth. “My parents weren’t too keen on the ‘mates and the bees’ talk.”

She rolls her eyes but her cheeks still flush prettily.    
  
"Hope you're okay with biting," she replies with a grin of her own. Distinctly wolfish.

 

Their descent down the rest of the mountain is surprisingly brusque. Kylo still refuses to let Rey walk; he has her thrown in a very ridiculous fireman's carry over his right shoulder, even though her legs have lost almost all of their trembling (through the stress of shifting, anyway; she can practically taste the desire pouring off of him, and it is making her tremble in a very different way). He stops halfway down his sprint to put her down momentarily. He can feel the wet denim scraping against his skin, and he peels his jeans off in order to prevent chafing. He tosses them over his left shoulder, and, despite her wriggling and squeals of protest, scoops Rey back in his arms for the rest of the hike down to his truck.    
  
He arrives at the vehicle breathless and sweating and grinning. Rey's arms are wrapped around his neck and through his hair and her skin is radiating more heat than the damn Nevada sun and he knows his straining underwear don't have long left. He lowers her carefully to the ground so he can grab his keys from his pocket so he can fumble with the lock.

And his firebrand girl is doing her damnedest to distract him at every turn. She's trapped between him and the truck and she is content to not be going anywhere. Her mouth is hot against his collarbone, her teeth scrape over the thick clusters of muscle in his neck, and her lips and tongue soothe the sting she leaves behind. All the while, that contented rumble is radiating from her chest.

He had tried his best to be a gentleman before; that meant not letting his eyes wander over the buck naked wolf girl who shifted in front of him, or permitting his fingers to graze her skin indecorously as he cradled her to him.   
  
The gentleman must have gotten lost on the mountain somewhere, because once he hears the click of the lock he drops the keys at his feet and there is no place his eyes and hands will not touch her. He presses her against the door and his hips are digging against hers and it's raw and wild and more powerful than the kisses they'd shared as just two humans days before.   
  
_ Ben Solo, you lucky mutt, _ he thinks to himself, his hands gripping her ass and lighting on her hips and he is so goddamn ready to feel the wetness of her cunt; the wild dark hairs had been teasing him all morning, but he hadn't permitted himself to stare before, no matter how much he wanted to.

She grins into his kisses, pulling the passenger-side door open behind her and falling backward onto the front bench seat. She quietly thanks whatever deity was on call that morning for the 1979 Chevy Silverado and its complete disregard for passenger safety.   
  
"C'mere, you," she growls, hooking her fingers into the waistband of his underwear and pulling him down on top of her. Her legs lock around his hips and she attacks his mouth again with all the ferocity and wildness that she had shed at sunrise.   
  
He kicks his boots off idly onto the dirt outside the cab as he presses his weight against her. Sure, he would love to be more romantic about this, but he would not deny her. Not when he wants her just as deeply, as eagerly. He props himself up on one forearm, freeing his other hand to clutch at her neck and shoulders, and he remembers faintly how it felt to have claws and teeth and his kisses become rougher and he holds her more firmly. He feels the wetness from between her legs transferring to his navel and he has to come up for air before he can touch her more.   
  
He pushes away from her suddenly, jumping back to the ground.   
  
Fuck his underwear. He doesn’t even notice where they land.   
  
She leans up on her elbows to watch him. Every last drop of blood in Kylo’s body dives immediately south at the sight of her. 

She looks...hungry. And utterly delectable at the same time. Her unreasonably kissable lips are flushed and plump, thanks to his lack of self-restraint when it comes to her. Little purple bites are blooming on her neck. Her breasts, perfect and soft little handfuls of rosy flesh, heave delicately, breathlessly. Her chestnut hair pours in perfectly messy waves around her shoulders, a few locks falling alluringly in front of her eyes. And oh, those eyes. 

The pupils are blown wide and black and haloed with a vein of molten gold. They speak of desire and lust and love for the man standing before her. She wants him. She wants  _ him _ .

He's no longer captive of his senses.    
  
He has no idea what she sees of him. He hopes it's something desirable. She hopefully isn't put off by his too-pale skin and the streaks of blood (likely hers, but also some of his own, as he had been carrying a fidgety wolf girl) that hadn’t quite washed off him through the sweat and rain. She's looking at him so hungrily, eyes lingering between his legs, that he knows he has nothing to fear.    
  
Bending over, he fishes in the pockets of his discarded jeans for a brief moment, finding the foil wrapper sticking out of his wallet. He clutches it in his fist and steps up into the cab of the truck again, ducking down so he can climb over her in the cramped space. He plants one hand next to her head, rests the other against her ribs, and his mouth again resumes its relentless pursuit of tasting all of her, despite the dust and sweat still clinging to both of them.

She gasps at his attentions and her hands snake up his arms to his shoulders and into his hair, her nails dragging lightly over his skin. She arches up into him in search of desperately needed friction and moans luridly when she finds it, her cunt grinding against his thigh. She growls a curse under her breath.

He laughs, low and throaty and hungry. He moves his hand to dance across her belly, and then run gently over her pubic bone. She writhes as his fingers trace lines across her inner thighs, and seek out the wet heat that calls for him.   
  
He brushes his nose against her skin, his hand and mouth seeking lower and lower. Her scent is rich and heady and he wants he wants he  _ wants _ . He kisses her belly as his hand rests on the top of her thigh, eyes darting up to her for permission. 

“Oh my fucking god,  _ yes _ ,” she breathes.

His hand sweeps through her wild curls to her cunt, tracing the folds of her, feeling the needs of her body yield to his touch.   
  
He hears he sounds of her pleasure, and he is goaded on. This is feral. This is human. He craves more.   
  
He rests his chin on her thigh and looks at her again, gaze soft.   
  
"I love you."

The words vibrate up through the very center of her and she keens, high and desperate. Breathing is becoming more and more challenging, between anticipation and the electric sensations rocketing through freshly formed nerve endings.    
  
“Fuck—Kylo...I love you...”

He smiles and kisses her leg, before his fingers again sweep through her wet and eager cunt, feeling for her clitoris.

When he finds it, her choked scream of pleasure is more reward than he could have imagined. All thought goes out the window. Her hands scrabble against his head and shoulders and the curses streaming out of her are miles away from ladylike.

The pad of his index finger toys with her in small circles until her writhing becomes too irresistible. With a laugh, he adds a second finger, letting his thumb tease her opening before slipping inside, humming happily against her skin.

“Fu—uck!” she groans. “Kylo, please...”

"Please what?

She drags her fingers through his hair, pulling his head away from her thigh.    
  
“Are you going to make me beg?” she gasps.

He leans forward and kisses her languidly before pulling his face away.   
  
"Yes."

Her head tips back against the ancient upholstery.    
  
“Please,” she breathes. “I need you. I want you inside me...”   
  
She looks down at him, her eyes dark with desire.    
  
“Please, mate...”

It is his turn to growl. There it is again, that word. He knows what it means now. Though he had been apprehensive, midway through his hike the rest of the way down the mountain, he had pieced together what it meant.   
  
Mate.   
  
They hadn't been together long at all, but there was something uncanny about how he felt when he was with her.   
  
Wolves mated for life, she'd said. She was completely a wolf, he was only part. And his father had loved a wolf. It cost him his life.   
  
He looked deeply into Rey's dark eyes, remembering the wolf that had protected him against her pack.   
  
He knows he has little to fear. He wants her.   
  
He reaches back up and grabs the foil wrapper, tearing to open and removing the condom. He slips it on in a few fluid movements, then sits back, looking down at her.   
  
"Of course, my mate," he murmurs, bracing a hand on her hips. "Anything for you."   
  
He circles her clit one last time before bracing himself over her and taking himself in his hand.   
  
He kisses her forehead tenderly before sliding into her, gasping at the pleasure of her wrapping around him.

She moans, low and guttural and  _ satisfied _ .    
  
“God you feel so fucking good,” she purrs.   
  
He can’t help but beam at the praise. He closes his eyes and lets the feeling of her consume him. Her hips buck up to take more of him, and he begins thrusting faster now that they are comfortable together. 

He pushes her over on the seat, minding not to hit her head on the door, and throws her legs over his shoulders, seeking to feel her deeper, deeper still.

Rey screams in pleasure and wraps the nearest seat belt around her fist. Her free hand latches onto his forearm with an iron grip. She can’t articulate how fucking fantastic it feels to be filled up this completely. Pinned as she is, she has no other choice but to let herself get swept up in the rhythm of his hips pounding against hers, his cock inside her cunt, his fingers digging into her thigh. And that’s all fine and great for a while (in fact it’s incredible), but she has other things in mind for her mate.    
  
With a few deft flexes of her strong legs, she pushes him onto his back, whining quietly at the loss of him inside her. He’s breathing hard when she straddles him. He’s groaning loudly when she impales herself on him again. She sets a maddening pace and he grabs onto her hips for dear life as she rides him six ways to Sunday.

His head is practically hanging out the open passenger side door as she bounces eagerly above him and he knows like hell he can't control her; he's just along for the ride now. He moans loud enough to shake the mountain. He rolls his hips as best he can to try to feel her, hitting the walls of her so she gasps and growls at the new sensation of pleasure. He can hear the shocks of the old truck squeaking beneath them and he can only laugh between his moans.   
  
He pulls her down to him to slow her pace, prolonging the bliss of her body. Her kisses her again, breathing in morning air and dust and feral wanting as he tastes her again.

She slows the roll of her hips, moaning into his kiss at the exquisite drag of him inside her. Her breasts rub tantalizingly against his chest as she leans over to devour his neck. She trails open-mouthed kisses up the straining muscles and nibbles delicately at his ear. She chuckles darkly when she feels his fingers digging into her hips.    
  
“Did I find a sweet spot there?” she purrs, tugging his earlobe between her teeth, thankfully not as sharp as they’d been a mere two hours ago.

He groans, sliding his twitching hands up her sides to feel more of her.   
  
"How did you guess?"

“Animal instinct.”   
  
She grins into a feral kiss, pulling him up with her as his arms curl around her back.

He savors the feeling of her skin against his. He likes the breathlessness of her voice as they forgo air in order to avoid breaking their kisses. His hands trail over her shoulder blades and spine and he shifts inside her as she grinds against him, purring into his lips.    
  
He breaks away.   
  
"Funny thing about instincts."    
  
He shifts himself out from under her and puts his hands on her waist  to help ease her off of him. She whimpers in protest, but he turns her around and lays her on her belly against the seat. He raises her hips to meet his, positioning himself behind her before bending over to whisper in her ear.   
  
"Mine are howling...to take you like this."

He pushes her hair away from her neck, slender and smooth and drenched with her juniper scent. He nuzzles his face against her nape and traces down her spine with his lips, soaking up her soft skin.    
  
She gasps and wriggles under him, propping up on her elbows to look back at him from under her lashes.    
  
“We just might make a wolf of you yet,  _ alpha _ .”   
  
His fingers tease her clit languidly. He chuckles into her back.

"If you want the wolf, you just have to ask."   
  
She arches like a cat, pushing her hips back to seek his.    
  
“You are just determined to make me beg, aren’t you?”   
  
He moans, shooting out his free hand to wrap around the back of her neck, his fingers snagging in her hair.   
  
"One of us is going to at this rate," he pants. "And alphas don't beg."

“Oh fuck me...” she breathes, the hand on the back of her neck at once assertive and comforting. A thrill of heat shoots through her veins.

His fingers are more insistent.   
  
"Say that again."

She chokes on a moan, the coil of electricity and fire deep in her gut burning hotter and higher from his stoking touches.    
  
“That sounds...that sounds like begging, Kylo...”

Forcefully but with considerable effort not to cause her pain, he jerks her head back to him. His other hand moves to brace her chest, and he leans forward, his cock teasing her wet opening.   
  
" _ I  _ don't beg," he growls into her ear.

She laughs breathlessly, shivers zinging across her skin.    
  
“We’ll see,” she whispers back.    
  
“Now are you going to fuck me, wolf-man?”

He snarls and pins her back down against the seat, his broad chest pressed tight against her shoulders.   
  
"So I'm the movie monster this time?"

She rolls her hips, seeking friction on her clit and his cock inside her. The tip of him bumps teasingly against her entrance and she whimpers.    
  
“Oh come on, baby,” she pants. “It’s a—ah, a compliment! Lon Chaney ain’t got nothing—fuck—on you...”

He laughs, snaking his hands along her back, nails biting in as they glide over her flesh until they come to a halt, digging into her ass. He likes her whimpers. He wants more.   
  
"I can take a compliment," he muses. With one leg bent on the seat on one side of her and one foot on the floor, he rocks his hips teasingly, letting her feel the head of his cock brush against her clit.   
  
"But I want you to beg, omega."

“Oh-ho  _ fuck _ you, Kylo,” she growls into the seat, her own nails scoring into the upholstery.

He releases her, and shifts his hips away from her.

He gazes appreciatively at this new angle of her as he begins to disentangle himself. He sweeps his hair off his neck. It has dried from the rain, but the sweat forming on his skin from their exertions in the morning heat was causing it to cake to him again.   
  
"You would like that, wouldn't you?"

She arches back into him, whining desperately.    
  
“Fuck, god, please...please fuck me, alpha.”

He bends forward, pressing his cock against her again, and snakes his hand through her hair. He pulls her face to his for a feral kiss.    
  
"I bet you say that to all the boys," he growls against her lips.

She laughs wildly. “I swear it’s true, I was just about to say ‘I love you.’”

"Stick to howling," he says, chuckling and kissing her hard. "Leave the singing to Meat Loaf."   
  
He pushes back so he's sitting upright and puts his hand back on her neck, dragging it slowly down her back to rest between her shoulder blades while the other rests on her hips and he nudges her legs further apart.   
  
"You might want to hold onto the seat," he purrs, sliding into her once more and swearing so loudly and forcefully the mountainside blushes.

And, oh, does she howl.    
  
The angle is incredible. He’s pounding on a spot deep inside her that she can never quite reach on her own. Her shoulders tense as she grips onto the seat in front of her face. Every thrust elicits a euphoric moan from her. Her eyes roll back as she gives in to the baying in her blood and the electricity in her nerve endings.

He finds a rhythm that makes him dizzy with the rapturous sensation.   
  
Leaving his hand on her back, he brings the other between her legs, and begins to toy with her clit again with his fingers.

Rey can feel herself flying headlong toward the edge; she feels the gold creeping back into her eyes and the instinct to  _ fuckmatebitebitebite _ screaming in her mind. She pushes herself up onto her hands, hissing at the new angle and how fucking full of him she is. With a toss of her chestnut hair, she looks over her shoulder at him.  He’s staring at her like she’s some kind of deity and it makes her heart expand painfully against her sternum and steals her breath. He can see the yellow of her eyes. He knows what he’s doing to her.    
  
In a split second and without him completely understanding how it happens, she has him pushed back up in the passenger’s seat and is straddling him. She rises up on her knees, looking down at him with shining eyes and breathing hard.    
  
“Kylo,” she murmurs.

He's dizzy and breathless and god, so close to coming it almost hurts to stop, but he sees her skin flushed on her cheeks and neck and chest and he knows. He knows what's coming in the back of his sex-addled mind.   
  
"Rey," he whispers, smiling and cocking his head at her.

She leans down to kiss him sweetly, lighting her hands on his face.    
  
“I love you,” she says quietly. “I want to be with you. I want to be your mate.” She pauses, her eyes intent on him. “Is this what you want?”

He swallows, taking a few deep breaths, stealing some blood back to his brain.   
  
His eyes focus on Rey's, and in the fading flecks of gold and the artificial gold of sunlight reflecting off the dust around them, he thinks of life without her. He thinks of married life with another woman, a human woman; of a conventional existence in a pleasant suburb, of car rides without laughing along to melodramatic rock ballads, of conversations without movie references, of dinners with just the right amount of garlic, of full moons spent in apathy instead of awe. Of a life where her incandescent grin and the adoration in her eyes are for someone other than him. 

His eyes trace her face, the human one, learning every dimple and freckle, and knows he could never want anything else.   
  
He takes another deep breath, fingers burying themselves in the skin on her back and ass.   
  
"Yes, Rey," he says with finality. "I want you. Always."

She smiles and a star seems to shine from within her. She kisses him deeply and sinks back down onto his cock, all satisfied sighs and liquid heat around him.

He gasps, and he comes back into his body once more as the sensations of  _ her _ on him and around him fire in his synapses. He closes his eyes and begins to rock his hips and push hers so they create friction again. When he feels the pleasure rippling from his cock again, he raises his chin and stretches his neck so she can see all of his pale, scarred throat. His Adam’s apple bobs expectantly. He's waiting for her.

Her hips speed up, building and building and building, her internal muscles tightening around him. She leans down and gently kisses down the line of his scar, from eyebrow to collarbone, absolving and healing and forgiving with every caress.    
  
Her movements have become frantic, the rhythm dissolving. She lays another kiss on the muscle between his neck and his shoulder. Marking her place.    
  
“Mine,” she growls.    
  
Her eyes flash gold. She sinks her teeth into his neck.

He gasps and stiffens, clutching her tightly as he shudders from the pain. It's exquisite. He feels her cunt tighten and her whole body pulses around him. She groans into his flesh, trembling in his arms and her bite digs deeper as the force of her orgasm rockets through her. He feels the blood trickling down his shoulder, and eventually, as she comes down from her high, he feels her jaws relax slightly.

He pants, his breath returning to him. He wraps her into a hug, as if she were the one in pain.

"I love you," he whispers.   
  
“I love you too.” She licks at the wound, soothing the sting, humming quietly. He realizes that she’s trying to comfort him, trying to sweeten the pain away. 

When she pulls back, still seated firmly in his lap, her pupils are glassy and blown wide, her lips are faintly bloodied, and her cheeks are glowing. 

“My mate...” she murmurs. “Will...will you bite me too?”

He can see a little bit of blood, his blood, staining her teeth, and he can't help but muse that it was sexy in a strange way that he could only hope was linked to his wolf ancestry. 

He laughs breathlessly, and tugs a lock of hair that had fallen over her shoulder. 

"Would you believe me if I said I'm afraid to hurt you?"

She chuckles. “I’m tougher than I look.”

Then her gaze softens and she smoothes her thumb against his cheekbone.

“You could never hurt me, Kylo. I trust you.”

His heart races more than he expected it to.

_ Yes _ , his lupine blood calls, masking the dread in his human mind.  _ Mark her as yours. _   
  
He traces a thumb across her collar bone, over her nipples, and against her ribs, admiring her warm, almost immaculate skin.

"Where do you want me?"   
  
She nuzzles his cheek.

“Wherever feels right.”   
  
He nods, his expression soft, focused. He pulls her mouth to his, and softly begins to rock his hips, letting the motion between them resume. He skates his tongue along her jaw, nibbling under her chin. No, that’s not right.   
  
His soft kisses along her neck draw moans out of her throat, but this isn’t correct either. He licks her neck, tasting the dirt and sweat and ghost of maybe soap from the day before, but no, no, not here.    
  
She whimpers, hypersensitive from her climax and shaking with the effort of keeping herself from falling apart at the seams. His lips skimming over her skin and his cock filling her cunt are setting her on fire from the outside and the inside.   
  
He moves faster, desperate for release. 

The skin at the base of her neck is delicious, but too taught.   
  
His hands wander her bare skin, trying to feel as much of her as he can. Faster. The friction is wonderful, and he knows he’s close. He grunts with the effort.   
  
He nibbles along the expanse of skin between her neck and shoulder, kissing and tasting whatever he can. 

Everything he touches and everything touching him feels so good and she feels perfect, absolutely perfect, and his hands involuntarily come to rest along her ribs and he knows there’s not much time, he wants her fuck he loves her he presses his face to the very top of her trapezius muscle, the point where she carries all her tension, and when he cums, the pleasure shuddering through him, he bites down right there and with a snarl, sinks his teeth in, marking her. 

Not bad for half a wolf.   
  
The sound leaves the world and the breath leaves her lungs and everything else just falls into place. Her sense of smell must have suddenly, acutely heightened, because all she can smell is Kylo. Her mate.    
  
He’s shuddering in her embrace, his mouth still latched onto her shoulder, and his arms impossibly tight around her. She loops her arms around his neck and shoulders, careful of his own fresh mark, and rubs at the base of his skull with her fingers.    
  
“Thank you,” she whispers into his hair. “Thank you, Kylo.”

He releases her, noticing the small mark he made, wet and bloody and red and hot. Blood wells up from a few small puncture wounds on her skin, and he gently brushes the top with his left thumb, his arm wrapped tight across her back.    
  
He kisses her lightly on the cheek, still panting. And then he laughs again, a joyful thing coming from maybe the moon-kissed parts of him, maybe the lonely human parts.   
  
He rocks her in his arms and fuck, he didn't know he could be this happy. The fucking mutt is in love and happy and the blood is rich in his mouth and he knows that he did something right because the light seems to hit the world a bit differently and everything is a bit more vibrant and the blood in his own veins is singing and he has a mate, damn it all. Nothing could matter more.

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Make sure you have the parking break on.
> 
>  
> 
> You may also notice that the chapter count has gone up, because we have no self-control.


	4. Part 4: New Moon

The story Han always told went like this:   
  
Leia went into labor on a waxing gibbous, and she was grateful for that. There were so many What Ifs haunting the expectant mother and pack leader as her due date drew closer. She was terrified of what might happen should she give birth moments before the full moon, with a staff of doctors and nurses watching her body break as they held her newborn child; they would have dropped the poor thing out of fright.   
  
Or worse; she was terrified to be in labor as the shift occurs. Would she be able to give birth as a wolf? Or worse still: what if the baby was being born and the shift killed her child (and then the nastiness of being discovered would follow, and also killing all the doctors and nurses in the delivery room out of fear and grief; the usual wolf things).

But none of this came to pass. She gave birth to Ben in the morning before the full moon, her strength and general stubbornness on display in how she pushed constantly, to the point all medical professionals present begged her to slow down, not not tire herself out before the time was right. Han just laughed the whole time. Proudest dad in the hospital. If you didn’t know better, you’d think his wife was straining herself just so they could meet the kid that much faster, he was so affable and light and she was so eager and focused.   
  
When she held her son in her arms, she was ready to run. Han convinced her to rest; it was still daytime, and she would be safe for now. Besides, their boy needed time to get used to being born.   
  
When Han held his son, that was the moment that Leia let herself relax, determined not to bolt off back to the den for a change, and she fell asleep while the nurses took Ben and Han kept an eye out to make sure they brought him back.   
  
The doctors recommended an overnight stay, but Leia wasn’t having it, and she told them so when she woke up. She packed the few things she had and told Han to grab the truck, she was taking her baby home that afternoon. The nurses urged her to rest herself, but that Was Not Leia, and she was soon demanding the discharge papers for her and young Benjamin Solo, not even 6 hours old.    
  
The rest of the afternoon was spent on the couch at their home, just off the pack property. It wasn’t safe for Han, a human, to live on pack grounds, which meant Leia spent a lot of time travelling back and forth. But now she just sat and watched the little bundled babe sleep in her arms, taking breaks only to give Han a chance to admire the kid, then taking him back, and just admiring the little wonder with the flushed skin and the shock of dark hair. Every now and then he would wake and cry and fuss a bit. She had managed to get the small thing to latch and feed before fleeing the hospital, and she learned to pump a little milk to get the boy through the night.    
  
As the sun began to sink, the new mother seemed morose. She ate a little of what Han had made her, changed into her shift clothes, and grabbed the keys. The den was only a mile away, and she didn’t need to lead the pack tonight, but she couldn’t shift alone, not this close to home. Too sorrowful to say goodbye to her new little family, she slipped out the door and started the truck without another word, the roar of the engine the only indication of her departure.   
  
Han was left alone with the tiny bundle of son, and he was more terrified than he would ever have admitted to his wife, but the crib had been set up in their bedroom weeks prior, so he went to the room off the main hallway to deposit the little thing into bed while he himself settled on the couch mere yards away, trying to get some rest despite the flurry of activity from bringing a new life into the world. Or watching it being brought into the world. He helped. The boy was his. He could tell. The kid had been around less than a day and accomplished very little, but he had demonstrated he owned a set of lungs, and Han knew the screaming came from him.   
  
He didn’t realize he had fallen asleep until he heard the crash around midnight. He jumped to his feet. The lamp toppled over somehow, and the room was submerged in darkness, and the front door, which Han swore he locked after Leia left (had he?) was open, the wood frame splintered, as if it had been shoved open. Ripped open. Forced.    
  
New father or not, his instincts were attuned instantly to protect his son.

He grabbed whatever blunt object he could find for defense-- in this case, a small end table, it was really all they had lying around -- and dashed into the bedroom as fast as he could manage in the darkness. He heard a rustling and saw a shadow moving in the room, and flipped on the light.   
  
There, curled in a defensive ball beneath Ben’s crib, was a chocolate brown wolf with warm, sad eyes.    
  
Shift be damned. Leia had returned home to be with her pup.   
  
She growled at Han for a moment before the smell of her husband flooded her nose and moon-drunk mind, and she put her ears back and lowered her head apologetically.   
  
“It’s alright sweetheart,” Han muttered. “Just wasn’t expecting you back so soon.”   
  
Han couldn’t settle back to sleep after that. He wasn’t worried about the wolf in the next room, but now the front door wouldn’t shut right, so he remained on the couch, guarding the door. He’d call Luke to look at it in the morning.   
  
About an hour later Ben cried. Han hadn’t even finished sitting up when the wolf came trotting in to fetch him, whining and grumbling plaintively at him.

Han couldn’t speak wolf, but he knew what she was saying.   
  
_ Help my baby _ . 

He went back into the bedroom and tended to Ben, going over the procedures the nurses taught him before they bolted from the hospital the previous day, the wolf of his wife ever on his heels.   
  
While he bounced the crying thing and tried to soothe it, he looked at the shifted Leia. He had seen her as a wolf a few times before, earlier in their courtship, but it had been a while since he had been able to see her on a full moon.   
  
He was surprised that even as a wolf Leia bore the signs of recent motherhood: he could see the teats on her chest were large, heavy with milk. She nudged his leg with her muzzle, as if wordlessly instructing him. He could tell she was in pain, various flavors of it. She wanted to nurse her baby, but couldn’t. They were too different at that moment. But she couldn’t bear to watch her pup cry and do nothing about it.    
  
It was a long night, but Han woke at some point the following morning to Ben, who had fallen asleep cradled to his chest, fussing again, and Leia, human and nude and asleep, curled up on the bed beside her family.   
  
It was the best night he’d ever had, Han would say, beaming proudly.    
  
Leia apologizes sadly, shaking her head and mumbling that she didn’t tell the story nearly as well as her husband did, but at that moment, Rey doesn’t care. She takes the older woman’s hand in her own.

“You told it well.”

 

When she finally answers the timid knocks on her front door, Leia almost doesn’t recognize the giant, broad-shouldered man with too-long dark hair and coffee-colored eyes. It had been nearly a decade since Ben Solo was last home. But all she has to do is inhale a bit deeper and she  _ knows  _ who this man is. She cannot speak, she can barely move, but tears are already beginning to well in her eyes, the same color as his.

He shifts uncomfortably, too big for the doorframe and his own skin. He shoves his hands into his pockets.

“Hi Mom,” he croaks.

She reaches a hand to his face, as if she were tracing the scar that started at his brow. He can almost feel her hand resting against his cheek, but then she pulls it back and wallops him.

“It’s been ten years, Solo!” she shouts. “Would it have killed you to call?”   
  
A young woman—no, a wolf, corrects Leia’s nose—tucked in behind him fails to suppress an undignified snort of laughter. 

“Oh my god, babe, your mom is  _ amazing _ ,” she chuckles.   
  
After saying next to nothing about his parents in the first several months of their relationship, Kylo had told Rey everything over the past couple days of driving out from Nevada to his mother’s home. He figured it was the least he could do as penance to her for being quiet to the point of deception until a few days prior. He told her about growing up in Oregon, with his parents taking in stray wolves who were passing through. Their home was small but it was surrounded by acres of forest, perfect for wolves on a hunt to disappear into without much human interference. He told her about how his mother, the alpha, stepped down from her position of leadership in the Resistance pack after having her son, because of a combination of fear for her child and unrest that was brewing in the pack. Some of her wolves felt betrayed that their leader would risk damaging the pack’s future by mating with a human man.   
  
Kylo hadn’t known what it meant as a kid, but he had seen the scar on his father, a u-shaped mark on his tricep. His mother had chosen a human mate, too.    
  
Kylo places a hand on his smarting cheek while Leia continues to vent, furious tears breaking free of her restraint and beginning to run down her face.   
  
“If it weren’t for your uncle-- You called him, but not me! Seriously, Ben?-- If it weren’t for Luke I would have thought you were dead in a ditch somewhere! With your father gone-- do you know how much it killed me to lose both my boys, one after the other?”    
  
She pants as the emotion surges out of her, years of it pouring out in a rush, all at once. “You know I didn’t blame you, you shithead!”

She slaps him on the bicep. He is so much larger, more muscular, than the young man she had last seen, dressed in black after his father’s funeral.   
  
Ben had packed his things and vanished a few days later, taking his father’s truck with him. And Leia hadn’t heard from her son since.   
  
She takes a deep breath, wiping her nose on her sleeve. She slams a fist into her son’s arm one more time and shoves him out of the way, finally addressing the other guest on her porch.   
  
“Another stray pup, huh?” she says, smiling weakly at the girl. “Was it my jackass son’s idea to bring you here?”   
  
Rey returns the smile gingerly. 

"Yeah, you could say that," she says. "I'm, uh...kinda on the run. We both are...from your old pack."

The older woman blanches.

Rey twists her fingers nervously in front of her. God, why is  _ she  _ the one talking? Right, because her mate just got bitch-slapped. 

"Kylo--er, Ben, I guess--is, no, was, our daywalker. I'd only been with the pack for a little while. We met at the casino and...well, now here we are. It’s kind of a long story."

Leia smells like clean mountain air and water lilies and  _ that's _ where Kylo's lemongrass comes from. She smells like a queen ought to smell. A true, bonafide alpha. Rey drops to one knee before the small woman, turning her head to the side and pulling down her shirt and jacket collar to expose her neck.

"Please, ma'am, I know I have no right to ask for your generosity, but I respectfully request permission to enter your territory, and--" She pauses, taking a deep breath. "--and the honor of joining your pack."

She bows her head even lower, the formality of the ritual shooting a terrifying sense of deja vu through her veins. The last time she was in this position, the alpha who had stood over her was nowhere near as accepting as she instinctively knew this one was. The last alpha had tried to kill her and her mate. She tries to breathe through the panic.

"You need only ask, and I will lay down my pelt at your feet."   
  
Leia’s eyes dart from the young woman to her son and back to the woman at her feet. The girl was irresistibly charming. No wonder her son would risk the ire of his mother to bring her somewhere safe.   
  
“No need for those formalities around here,” Leia says with a grim chuckle. “You can get up. I don’t have that kind of pack. Strays stay as little or as long as they need.”   
  
She sees a peek of medical tape across the young woman’s neck and back. Leia’s gaze wanders back to Ben. She sees a gauze patch bulging on his neck under his shirt collar.   
  
Oh.   
  
_ Oh. _

She swallows the lump of emotion welling in her throat. She tries to keep her tone level. She gently places a hand on the young woman’s arm, compelling her to meet her gaze.

“Come on in, sweetheart. But no more of that bowing nonsense. I’m not that kind of alpha.” Leia maneuvers her body out of the way so the girl can rise to her feel and enter in the house. It had rained earlier, and a chill had settled over the property.   
  
“But you Ben, or  _ Kylo _ , or whatever the hell you’re calling yourself: you better have brought the Silverado back because your ass is sleeping in it until you give me one good reason to believe you’ve unfucked yourself enough to come inside.”

Rey looks back over her shoulder at Kylo frantically. They had slept in the truck on the drive up, but a September night spent out in the desert was a different animal entirely from sleeping out in the chilly Oregon wilderness. Her eyes catch his and she looks lost at the idea of spending a night away from her mate. She breaks away from the smaller woman and backs herself into Kylo's space. She turns her gaze back onto Leia.   
  
"With all due respect, Mrs. Organa-Solo, but if he sleeps in the truck, then I do too."    
  
Her tone is firm but Leia can smell the young woman's nerves buzzing sour and hot in the cold mountain air. This is not necessarily the best impression to make on a new alpha, especially if that alpha is her mate's mother, and the girl knows that. But Leia sees the spunk and the fire in her and she is reminded of a young alpha who had defied convention and all the odds to become the first female pack leader in the state of Nevada.    
  
Maybe her prodigal boy wasn't a completely lost cause if this little spitfire had chosen him as her mate…

Leia arches a bemused eyebrow. "I see."    
  
She crosses her arms over her chest and approaches the young couple, looking steadily between the two of them. The girl is staring back at her defiantly, her son has the good sense to avoid his mother's gaze at all costs.    
  
"Tell you what. You go on inside and put the kettle on for tea. I need to have a word or two or several, with my son."   
  
She notices the nervous look the girl tilts up to Ben's face. He squeezes his arm around her shoulders encouragingly and kisses her temple.    
  
"It's okay, sweetheart," he rumbles lowly into her hair, nudging her forward gently.   
  
She nods and moves past Leia into the house.   
  
"Kettle's on the stove, tea's in the cabinet above the sink, and I'll take Earl Grey," Leia calls in after her as the screen door bangs shut behind her.    
  
It takes less than two minutes for the yelling to start. Rey diligently fills the kettle as she studiously tries to tune out the decade-overdue brawl.

After setting the kettle on the stove and turning on the burner, she wanders into the small living room, comfortably furnished with worn-looking seating that seems to be built for impromptu napping. Her eyes scan over the family photos hanging from the wall and littering the stuffed bookshelves and coffee table. She sees Kylo as a boy at various ages with his mother and father, his strange, comfortable little pack. Celebrating holidays, traveling, sitting outside this very house in different seasons, smiling, laughing. The images are alien to her.   
  
There are also several other photos, older ones, yellowed with age, clustered in a corner by the staircase. Young people smiling in the desert. Her old pack-- Leia’s old pack-- posing in the den, taking smoke breaks behind the Resistance.   
  
She had run out on perhaps the closest thing she could think of as a home several days prior. It occurred to her that this might be her home soon. Did she even deserve it?

  
  
Rey and Kylo decided as soon as they got their things together to hit the road, just to get as far away from Resistance territory as they could before the pack could shift again and seek their revenge.    
  
As the sun sunk below the horizon, Kylo told her everything. His eyes locked on the road, he told her about his parents, about the strange relationship that blossomed between the young female alpha and the trucker who had rescued her when she was injured by the roadside. About their attempts to build a family that bridged two very different worlds. About his mother’s bottomless compassion; her uncanny humanity despite her wolfishness; her desire to help the strays that couldn’t find their place either in the wild or in society.

About how he admired her from afar every full moon, wishing he could be more wolf.

About his great mistake that destroyed their family, and how he regretted it every day. How he had never faced his mother and apologized for what he had done. He couldn’t face her after his father’s funeral.    
  
He had reconnected with his uncle, Luke, Leia’s poor twin brother who hadn’t received the gift as his sister had, and had been raised by a human family while his sister was raised in the pack by alpha parents following the death of her biological mother and father. Luke knew what it was like to be different. Kylo took a new name and went off to find his own fortune, no longer constrained by his mother’s legacy or his father’s weakness. He hadn’t expected his uncle to call for his help, but taking care of the shop was the most stability he had experienced in years, and he was grateful for it.

Rey had never seen Kylo that serious before. His voice was hollow with years of sorrows that he had tucked away. After staring down a fully shifted alpha wolf, she never imagined she would see him so afraid.   
  
It grew late. He found a campsite off the highway and pulled over, exhaustion weighing him down at last. He paid for a night and parked out as far away from the other sites as he could without leaving the property. He spread a blanket out over the bed of the truck and invited Rey to join him. They would be safe for the night, or so he hoped.   
  
Sensing his anguish, Rey kissed him and stroked his hair and tried to tell him he would be alright.   
  
He kissed her back. Little pecks turned into something hungrier. They peeled off their clothing. They made love under the stars and a moon that demanded nothing of them.

  
  
Rey almost misses the whistling of the kettle over the shouting on the porch. She is glad in this moment that the Solos lived far away from their neighbors, otherwise there might have been an incident. Rey had learned long ago never to make Scenes, lest they become Incidents, lest the cops arrive and send her back on the run again.    
  
Returning to the kitchen, Rey pours water into a mug for herself before preparing two for the howling pair outside. She remembers to remove the tea bags after several minutes when there is no indication of a ceasefire.

A few moments later, Leia peeks her head in. She is breathless and red in the face, but genial.   
  
"What do you want on your pizza?"     
  
It takes Rey a moment to process the question. Leia strolls in, grabbing the purse by the door and fishing out her wallet. 

“I’m calling in an order. What kind of pizza do you want? We usually get sausage and mushrooms. Is that alright, or do you want something else?”   
  
Rey blinks owlishly. “Uh, no, yeah, that sounds perfect,” she says slowly. “Honestly I'll eat anything, I’m really not picky.”   
  
She picks up the chipped mug of tea and passes it timidly to her hostess.    
  
“I didn’t know how you liked it, so I didn’t put anything in it.”   
  
She peers past Leia's shoulder to the front porch. A shadowed lump of Kylo is sitting on the steps, his elbows on his knees.   
  
“I’m almost afraid to ask, but is everything okay?”

"Right now? No way in hell." Leia’s voice is creaky from screaming. "But we put it off for this long for that exact reason. It was never going to be okay. But we let it fester rather than yanking off the bandage."

She sits the mug down, pulls some cash out of her wallet, and counts it out.

"We both need to cool off, so I'm sending my dumbass pup to get us all some food while I get some alone time with you to explain what exactly it is I do here."

She meets Rey's gaze. "I think a large will be enough. I'm calling in the order now. If you want to check in on your mate..." She jerks her head in the direction of the door. "I'm sure he wouldn't mind one bit."

Rey is out the door before Leia can finish her sentence. The screen door bangs once again in her wake. Suddenly it seems like her footsteps on the old porch are as loud as atomic bombs. Kylo doesn't even flinch. She steps up behind him and looks down at his dark head, facing resolutely forward. The stairs groan beneath her as she sits close beside him and rests her head on his bicep.   
  
She waits. She doesn't need to say anything, she can sense that. She just needs to be there.

He slips his arm loosely around her shoulders.

His breathing is heavy. He buries his face in his broad palm.

He's glad she can't see him.

"How much did you hear?" he asks, voice weak.

She shakes her head. "Nothing really, just a lot of shouting."   
  
She burrows in closer to his body and wraps her arms around his chest under his coat, as if she could stabilize and support the tremors vibrating just beneath his skin. Her heart aches for him and she doesn't know how to help him. So she just clings a bit tighter and nuzzles her face against his collarbone.   
  
"You know I love you, right?" she murmurs. "I love you so much. And I wish I could help you."

He kisses her head. "I love you, too. That's why I tried to warn you."

She hides a small smile in his shirt. "Yeah, maybe this time I should've listened to you instead of being a damn fool wolf about it."   
  
She follows his gaze out into the misty evening; the sunset paints the trees gold instead of Nevada copper. Everything is so green out here and it soothes Rey's soul in a way that she had never realized a color could.   
  
"Honestly, I think this is a good thing." She squeezes a little harder and one of her hands starts rubbing circles on the exposed skin at the small of his back. "You're finally healing now. Both of you. And, yeah, it sucks ass right now and it's hard shit you're doing...but at the end of all the pain you're both going to look back on tonight and thank each other for giving enough of a damn to do the hard work."   
  
She peeks up at him. "I'm really proud of you, Kylo."

His eyes are still red and his face is still flushed from fading anger but the look he gives her is nothing short of loving.   
  
“You know I couldn’t have done this without you, right?” he says, laughing weakly and wiping his nose on his sleeve. “You really do bring out the best in me. Or, I think...you make new good things out of nothing. Yeah, that’s it. Because I am not giving you a lot to work with.”   
  
He laughs at himself bitterly. “No, you’re right. This hurts like a motherfucker. I should have just let Poe rip me to pieces. Would have smarted less.”   
  
He looks back to the house tentatively. “How’s the she-beast?”   
  
She smiles wryly, poking playfully at his back. "Manners. She's ordering pizza. You're about to be sent out on a hunt-and-gather mission, by the way."   
  
"She did mention something about dinner," he grumbles. "Did she say what kind of pizza?"

"Sausage and mushroom."

"Oh, that monster. My one weakness."

She grins. "And here I thought I was your one weakness."

"And she's using you against me too!" He runs his hand through his hair. He's starting to relax, even though he doesn't yet realize it. "You just wait. She's going to have you completely on her side before we know it."

She shrugs under his arm. "I don't know, babe, she's really convincing. And really scary. You can't blame me for taking her side if she strong arms me into it."   
  
He groans as the screen door creaks open again. Leia stands there and offers a small stack of bills to the man slumped over on her porch.    
  
“Order’s in at Maz’s. It’s under my name, since I don’t know what the hell you’re calling yourself these days,” Leia says, commanding more strength and authority than Rey thought possible for a woman so small. “I don’t care if you run off with my cash here, but if you plan to take the money and bolt, at least leave your mate her stuff. The donations are getting very unfashionable.”

Rey winces a little. She knows it's a joke, but even the suggestion of Kylo running is enough to chill her blood. She inhales sharply and goes to disentangle herself from him.   
  
He snaps to attention and turns on his mother, shaking Rey off of him as he rises.   
  
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he hisses. “Do you really think I’m that dishonorable that I would run off for twenty bucks?”   
  
Leia shrugs, unphased and almost smug about how perfectly her blow has hit its intended target. 

“It’s only like $15, but you abandoned your mother without so much as a kiss goodbye after your dad’s funeral, so who knows?”   
  
Kylo appears more the wolf than his mother in this moment, and if he had hackles, they would have risen. Leia just leans against the door frame, her hand still offering the cash.

“You don’t know me,” he growls. “You don’t know what the fuck I was feeling.”

“No, I didn’t! And I still don’t!”    
  
At his full height, Kylo towers over his mother, but she doesn’t flinch. She narrows her eyes up at him.    
  
“You’re just as goddamn reckless and impulsive as your father, and I don’t give a shit if you do go peeling out of here and never look back.”   
  
She stands up straight and raises her chin at him.   
  
“You can say whatever the hell you want, do whatever the fuck you please; you can’t hurt me anymore. But I won’t let you hurt her.”   
  
He is practically snarling at the smaller woman. “I am not going to fucking leave her!”

“You don’t have to prove it to me!” she shouts in his face. “Prove it to her! I know you’re a goddamn mess. I’ve known for a long time, pal. You need to show  _ her _ you’re not. Show her you’re worth something.”

Before he can scream, lunge, attack, whatever, Rey steps in front of Kylo, suddenly surprisingly calm in her conviction. She just barely touches her hand to his chest, but it is enough to effectively still his rage almost instantly. She sheds her jacket, her eyes locked on Leia’s, so like her son’s. She tugs the collar of her soft gray T-shirt down her shoulder and pulls the bandage off of her skin. The wound is bruised like a gruesome watercolor painting but already scabbing over nicely enough. That doesn’t matter. She wants Leia to see the teeth marks.

“I think I believe it,” Rey says quietly. “He may have been a fuck up then, and he may be a mess now. But he’s mine. And he’s changing. He stared down a full moon alpha and didn’t flinch. To save me.” She glances back at her mate. “And I know he’d do it again if he had to.”

She turns her gaze back to Leia and she can tell her eyes are turning gold.

“He can change. I’ve seen it.”

Leia merely cocks her head and smiles. She briefly places a gentle hand on Rey’s shoulder, mindful of the bite, before turning back to her son, still fuming silently despite his mother’s sudden irritatingly calm demeanor.

“You haven’t changed a bit.” She smiles at Kylo. Her voice cracks as she steps closer to him.

“You are still every bit your father’s son. And I hate how much you make me miss him.”   
  
She gingerly grabs the young man’s large hand and places the money into it.

“Go. I’ll take care of her, show her around the place. We’ll be waiting for you when you get back.”

Rey readjusts her shirt and turns back to Kylo. She smiles gently and leans up to press a kiss under his jaw.    
  
“I love you,” she hums. “I’ll be right here.”

The last of the feral tension in his body melts at her touch. He nods, dazed, kisses her forehead slowly, and trudges off towards his truck.

Rey watches him drive back down the hill with a soft look in her eye. He'll be back, she knows it. 

"Right," she says, bending down to retrieve her jacket. "What can I do to help, Mrs. Organa-Solo?"

"First of all, it's Leia. We're a pack for however long you're here. None of that Mrs. shit. Secondly." She offers a hand. "It's wonderful to meet you, Rey. I wish that we'd had a nicer introduction. Without all that..." She gestures around her head in a bizarre improvised sign for ‘shouting.’ "I'm sorry you had to see that. But I'm glad you're here. Really."

Rey takes the hand and grins.    
  
“Nothing I haven’t seen before, Mrs.— Leia. And I truly can’t thank you enough for taking us in with no warning. We won’t be any trouble...I hope.” Her smile falters. “After everything with the Resistance pack, we...we had nowhere else to go. Kylo said that you were the safest place for us to stay.”

Leia smiles, regarding Rey. "He said that, huh? The mutt really believed that?"   
  
She swallows, then places her other hand on top of Rey's.   
  
"If he would risk my wrath coming back here to make sure you two were safe..." Her voice cracks with emotion as she speaks. "If he would do that, then he might very well be the man you say. And you'll have far less fighting to endure."

Rey chuckles softly, her eyes beginning to prickle. "Thank you. Thank you so much, you have no idea how much this means to me. To be safe." She exhales a shaky breath. "Thank you."

Leia ushers her inside the house, returning to her mug of tea, her long blue and white flannel trailing behind her like a cape.   
  
"I guess I can give you a tour while we wait. Since you're a member of the pack for your entire stay here, you get your own room. I guess if and when he unfucks himself, Ben can have his old room back, too."   
  
She begins to lead Rey to the stairs and pauses.   
  
"Look, I know I'm giving you separate rooms and I am really happy you two found each other and are mated and all that, but please indulge this old bitch for a bit. I know you're just going to sneak into each other's rooms when my door is shut, but let a mother pretend that she won't have to fall asleep listening to the creaking of her only son's bed for a FEW moments, alright? I’m not a prude, I swear, just...the kid has never brought a girl home before and he's been gone for a while. I need to adjust, too. I ask for so little."

Rey has the good grace to blush.    
  
"We'll try to be respectful," she says sheepishly.    
  
As she follows Leia up the stairs, Rey eyes the pictures on the walls leading up. Dozens of photos of the family and individuals who she assumes are past loners dot the walls in a collage of smiling, scruffy faces. She notes with a smile one picture of a young dark-haired boy laughing from atop the shoulders of the largest and hairiest man she's ever seen. She stops to admire it.    
  
"How long have you been doing this? Taking in strays, that is."

Leia laughs and turns once she has arrived at the top of the stairs.

"Since I could howl."   
  
She begins to walk down the hallway.   
  
"The Resistance wasn't my first pack of loners. It wasn't to be my last. They come and go. Some stay for a spell, some for months. Some are kind. Some are not. They are people, as we all are, to some degree."   
  
She looks at Rey, hand resting on a doorknob.   
  
"You've seen shit. You've been places; I can tell. So what's harder for you: being a wolf, or being human?"

Rey is silent, thinking. It’s a question she’s never really put to herself. Or maybe she has, but she was too scared to answer it before.    
  
“Human,” she says quietly.    
  
“I...I’ve spent a lot of my life alone. My parents abandoned me when I was little, really little, and then I got bounced around a lot. Foster homes, group homes, juvenile centers. And then the moon hit when I was fourteen; late bloomer from the malnutrition.”   
  
She laughs bitterly.    
  
“If I thought no one wanted me before, then I had no idea just how little anyone wanted me once  _ that _ shit cropped up. Behavior problems, bad temper, hair growing in new and strange places; shit, I was the fucking poster child for troubled foster teens. A few packs tried taking me in early on, tried to show me the ropes, but I wasn’t socialized. I was too feral, even for my own kind. The runt of the litter. A scrappy, angry, little omega with a chip on her shoulder and no bloodline to keep her safe. So then I basically was homeless. When I turned eighteen, I went off the grid. Did odd jobs, lived out of a backpack, hitchhiked my way across the Southwest during the day, shifted my way through the night. At one point I stayed pelted for almost two full weeks until the full moon forced me out of it.”   
  
She leans up against the wall across from Leia in the dark hallway. The weight of her history pushes down on her shoulders and forces her to the floor, slipping down the wall. She hasn’t even told Kylo this. She doesn’t remember when she started crying.    
  
“I felt...god, I felt so fucking betrayed. It was like, like even the moon didn’t want me. I was free, truly, completely free, and then I just... _ wasn’t _ . And the cruelest part was that I could remember what that freedom tasted like. To know the stone under my paws, and blood in my mouth, and running and running and running, and the goddamn moon took that away from me.”    
  
She buries her face in her hand.    
  
“The only thing that was ever truly mine and that fucking rock took it away without so much as a ‘fuck you very much.’”   
  
She sniffs, wipes her face, and looks back up at Leia.    
  
“If I hadn’t found your son, I probably wouldn’t still be alive to have this conversation with you.”

Leia slowly and with a small amount of grumbling and hissing at her aging joints, lowers herself to sit beside the young woman. She wraps her arm around her shoulders.   
  
"You poor pup. You've had a time of it. But you  _ are _ free here. And Ben..." She chuckles. "He can't be all bad if he took you in, can he?"

She drew Rey closer. "You will be safe here. Both of you. You are welcome as my pack for as long as you need."

Rey leans her head against Leia’s shoulder, the tears coming back in earnest. She reaches up to squeeze the older woman’s arm.    
  
“Thank you,” she chokes. “Thank you so much.”   
  
This house, this woman, the woods around them, it feels like...home. It feels the way she should’ve felt with the pack. It feels the way Kylo feels to her: warm and comforting and safe. Above all, Rey finally feels safe.    
  
Leia rocks the girl as she cries, crooning softly into her hair for as long as Rey needs.    
  
This poor child, Leia thinks to herself. To have been so alone for so long and to have been given such a lonely curse. She imagines what Rey’s life would have been like if she had only been found by kinder people earlier in her life. If perhaps, she and Han had found her. How different it would have been for this sweet, brave girl to have known love all along…

 

He seethes all the way to the pizza place, his mother’s words igniting the tips of his ears into a angry red.

She knows how to push his buttons. She always had.

He isn’t going to leave Rey. They all know that. But Leia had channeled her pain, years of it, into the most humiliating attack possible.   
  
There was nothing shameful about mating, he thinks, though he had no knowledge of the term prior to the day he mated with Rey. His parents hadn’t spoken to him about it much, perhaps because they expected he would choose the past of least resistance, and choose a human woman, all the better to blend in with the human society he couldn’t quite connect with but still was a part of.

He had thought of this the previous night, Rey snoozing naked against his chest, the stars clear and bright above them, not a sound for miles. He was wrapped in her scent and he could only imagine that if the Resistance pack hadn’t been so determined to keep Rey under a tight curfew at night, preventing them from exploring each other carnally, there would have been no way for him to hide the alpha in his scent. 

This was what he wanted. But she needed more than a devoted hybrid lover; she needed a place to roam. She would still be a wolf. There was only one safe place he could think of, and it killed him to return home.

He and his mother hadn’t looked at each other since the morning Leia made the frantic call to the police, saying Han had been attacked by a feral dog while defending his son. It wasn’t Leia’s way to handle this. It was the human way. 

His body was removed from the property. A small funeral was held. The wolves who had been like family came to honor the human who had risked his life to give them a place to rest their heads.

And mother and son didn’t speak.   
  
_ “Ben, what have you done?” _

That was perhaps the last thing she said to him.   
  
After the funeral ended, he packed his things, grabbed the paperwork necessary to function as a human, and drove off in his father’s truck, no definite direction in mind.

He would no longer be Ben.

The pizza sits beside him on the bench of the truck for the rest of the long trek back home.

Everything was a trek from his house, which is why his parents had moved out here before he could walk.

It would be safe for him. Safe from the pack. 

It would be safe for Rey.

  
  
After they had both recovered from their love making the previous morning, Kylo retrieved his clothing from the dust, offering Rey his tattered shirt and underwear for the ride home.   
  
He himself had left his jeans to dry on the seat between them. His torso streaked with blood, some hers, some his, who gives a flying fuck, he wore only a smile and his boots, because he thought it would be disastrous to drive barefoot, god forbid. She couldn't stop laughing at him the entire drive back.   
  
Despite the frustrated customers waiting for the store to open, Kylo slid his pants on and sneaked Rey in the back entrance before offering his apologies to the men waiting to buy cigarettes and coffee; he explained that due to a family emergency, he would not be able to open the store for a while.   
  
It was not entirely a lie.

When they reached his apartment over the shop, he tucked her into his bed so she could rest for a few hours while he made plans. He had spent so many nights in this room fantasizing about her, planning future dates with her. He remembered the first time he came home from the casino, head light as air because that dealer girl had gotten under his skin and he knew what she probably was but he couldn't care less. His uncle had warned him about being too friendly with the pack and he was afraid to tell her the truth of what he was but he hoped it wouldn't come up. Not right away, anyway. He would tell her eventually was he was but after that first meeting he just wanted to kiss this girl and bring her home and make her feel like a goddamn lady.

And the first time he had really brought her home, it was just in time to take her away. There was a bittersweetness to it.   
  
After showering, he made a few calls to allies at the den. When Rey awakened in the mid-afternoon, he had finished packing, and, taking whatever they could from his fridge, he loaded the truck, taped down the “Closed” sign on the shop window, and drove one final time to the Resistance. Finn was waiting behind the building with the few bags of Rey's stuff, which Kylo had dutifully tied down in the bed of the truck.   
  
The beta gave Rey one last big hug goodbye.   
  
"Be safe, little moon girl," he muttered in parting. Rey was sad to see him go, but was delirious to see the rest of the pack lands vanish in the rear view mirror.

Kylo was scared, but determined. 

He had one other home to take her to. He didn’t care what it would cost. He thought of that gold-eyed wolf and knew one place she would be safe.

And he started driving.

 

It is that concern for her that cools his temper when he finally pulls up into the long driveway with the pizza. His parents’ home is the safest place for Rey. The shop couldn’t have been her home any more than the den was. He needed to take his mate somewhere she would be safe, even if he wouldn’t be.

Even if his mother makes the snarling, black wolf-form of Poe look like a show poodle.

He doesn’t know how much of that was the wolf in her. 

Though the sun had mostly set by now and the property is dark, he is shocked to notice that there is almost no light in the house, and his heart freezes in fear. He bounds inside, pizza in hand, the screen door slamming shut behind him.

He can hear the noise from upstairs and he flies up to the second floor, his boots barely touching the steps.

Despite the darkness he can see his mom and his mate clutching each other and crying on the ground. Stunned, he almost drops the warm box in his hands.

“Rey, Mom, is everything…?”

Rey's eyes turn up to his face, red-rimmed and raw and half-blind with emotion.    
  
"Ky-lo," she hiccups, reaching a shaking hand out for him.

He falls to his knees beside her, setting the pizza to the side. He's afraid to touch her lest he hurt her more.

The words pour out of him in torrents.    
  
"What's wrong what happened Rey are you okay please don't cry I'm here."

She grabs his hand and pulls him to her, wrapping her arm around his neck and burying her face in his shoulder.

He immediately hugs her back and shoots his mother a concerned, beseeching look.

She smiles softly back at him and, rising to her knees with some effort, enfolds both of her kids into her arms.

"Wha..." Ben stammers, flustered by his mother's sudden warmth towards him, absent since his father's loss.

Leia just squeezes them tighter and presses a kiss into his hair.

Kylo can feel his mother's own tears pressing into his scalp.   
  
"Mom, not you too.”

"I wish your father could be here," she whispers, stroking a hand over Rey's hair. "He would've loved this one."   
  
She rests her cheek against the top of his head.    
  
"I wish he could be here to tell you everything that I can't. Being a wolf's mate is a hard and difficult life, but it was one that he chose and one that he loved. And I know that you are going to cherish Rey just as much as he cherished me. I wish he could tell you...tell you how much he loved you. He loved you so much, Ben."

"I'm so sorry," he whispers, barely audible. "It's all my fault, Mom. It's my fault he's gone."

"Shhh, no, sweetheart. I don't blame you. Ben, I have never blamed you."

"I didn't listen, and you were right. I did it," he sobs, an arresting sound to Rey. "I did what I shouldn't have."   
  
He pants as tears roll down his long cheeks. "He protected me. I lost him for both of us. I miss him so much."

Rey clings tighter to her mate and his mother. The loss radiating between the two of them is so palpable that she can taste it. She knows this feeling. She wishes there was a way for her to spare them the agony that they all know too well now.

Leia pulls a hand free and draws her son's gaze to her, two sets of the same eyes looking at each other. She presses a kiss to his scarred cheek.   
  
"I was so sad to lose him that I lost you, too" Leia said. "I let you believe that it was your fault. You're not just my pack, Ben. You're my son. I wouldn't be here if not for you."   
  
She hugs the large man close to her.    
  
"You are my family, and the family you chose..." Leia cast her eyes on Rey, wiping her nose on her sleeve.   
  
"She's my family, too. And I'm so happy to have you here."

A fresh flood of tears soaks his shirt as the reality of this hits Rey. She has a family now. A real one. Not just a pack, but a family.

Kylo nuzzles his mate as she weeps, the three figures in the hallway now painfully entangled as they cry in the dark hall.

When the sobs finally cease and the tears finally dry, Leia pulls both Kylo and Rey's heads up to look at her. She places a kiss on both of their foreheads and lays a gentle hand on each of their faces. She wipes their tears with her thumbs and smiles fondly at them.    
  
"Now," she sniffs wetly. "If there's anything better after a good cathartic cry-fest than Maz's pizza, then you can shave my ass and call me a shih tzu."

Ben wipes his nose on his wrist.    
  
"Yeah, please don't."   
  
Rey bursts out laughing, scattering the tears that still waited, poised on her lashes.    
  
Leia scoops up the pizza box and rises with a few frustrated grunts as she rises.   
  
"I'll grab plates. See you kids downstairs in a second."   
  
She steps over her son and future daughter-in-law with some effort and vanishes down the stairs.   
  
Kylo wipes Rey’s tears with his broad thumb and brushes a whisper-soft kiss on her cheek.   
  
"So you two had a good talk?"

She nods, still giggling. "Yeah. Your mom's kind of incredible. You're a lot like her, I think."

Kylo stands up suddenly and crosses his arms but his eyes are soft.    
  
"Keep up with that talk and I'll unbite you. I don't care how cool you think she is."

She smirks up at him and holds up her hands for help to her feet.   
  
"Well then by proxy doesn't that mean that I think you're incredible?"

She bats her damp eyelashes. "And smart and handsome and funny and sexy..."

"Please stop hitting on my mom."

"Oh my god, just help me up, you mountain range."

He bends over, and a few quick movements scoops her up, and throws her over his shoulder again.

She squawks and slaps his ass as he carries her down the hall.

"You are the WORST, Kylo-Ben!"

"I AGREE." Leia shouts as they emerge on the staircase.    
  
Kylo drops Rey gracelessly on the sofa before going to the kitchen for plates for the two of them.    
  
"There's going to be no living with the two of you now, is there?" he calls over his shoulder.

Rey beams at her new little family.    
  
"Absolutely not."

Leia hands her son two plates of pizza and warns him sternly about spilling on the couch.    
  
He walks over to his mate, kisses her softly, and serves her dinner.   
  
"Welcome home, Rey."

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Momma Leia would have been the best fucking cub scout den mother fight me.


	5. Epilogue

Rey throws her head back. She feels like she's about to howl.  
  
However, she manages to stifle her feral moan of rapture. She doesn't want to disturb Leia, after all, who is likely still asleep. The shift is still well over two hours away.  
  
She looks down her body at Kylo's dark head, shaggy between her thighs. His eyes are closed in contentment as his tongue and lips suckle happily on her clit, his large hands folded primly across her middle. Kneeling beside the bed, he almost looks like he’s praying. A prayer of thanks, probably.

"Holy _shit_ , Kylo..." she whisper-moans.  
  
He is eating her out like it's his last goddamn meal and she is the last rest stop on the highway. The heady scent of arousal hangs like velvet in the air of their second-floor bedroom. It's a good thing that Leia rarely comes upstairs, or she'd be getting one hell of a show on multiple sensory levels.  
  
She writhes underneath him and her back arches when one hand leaves her belly to slip between her folds.

He pushes her back down with the hand on her stomach and his eyes snap open.  
  
She had been away from the desert for almost a month, but there's still that taste of juniper and flesh and sex and he loves that she is his, he gets to lick and taste her as much as he can.  
  
"Stay," he commands, his breath hot against her cunt.

She chokes on a whimper and obeys, her fingers digging into the sheets under her as she forces her body to still. Her muscles quiver with the effort of trying not to come apart.

He pulls his mouth away to catch his breath, his lips full and red and glossy from her. He rests his head on her thigh as he pulses two broad fingers into her.  
  
"I'll miss you tonight."

She looks down at him, panting herself, her eyes gold and glittering with heat and desire and near-wolfish ferocity.  
  
"Don't...worry, baby...I'll come--ah, I'll come back to you. I'll a-always come back to you..."

Shifting his knees on the hardwood floor and kissing the top of her thigh, he meets her stare.  
  
"Good," he purrs. "I don't want to lose you out there in the woods."  
  
He buries his face in her pubic hair. Her neck relaxes and her head tips back against the mattress with a sigh.  
  
"I want you to know I'm yours."

Her head pops back up.  
  
"...are you scent-marking yourself?" she asks incredulously, her cheeks flaming.

He flicks his gaze up to hers and freezes.  
  
"Is...is that weird?"

She leans up on her elbows and grins as she tugs his face closer to hers for a languid kiss. He _does_ smell like her. Even to her human nose. There's no way she could miss him as her mate, even with the moon loud and ringing in her wolf ears.  
  
"Honestly? It's fucking hot," she growls against his lips. "Means you're mine. My mate. _All mine_."

In a second he's pinning her against the bed, attacking her mouth with his. He's hard and he wants her. He tries not think of his mother downstairs and their promises not to disturb her with their sickeningly saccharine honeymoon phase. She can smell it on them.

"Should I mark you, too?" he growls into her neck, before licking a line over to the small, fresh scar that bound them to each other.

She gasps, her fingers tangling in his hair. "Please, mate. Make me yours."

He hadn't expected his day ending this pleasantly or his night starting this deliciously.  
  
When he had come home from his new job at the auto shop to his fiancée, as she was so called in human company, they had both stripped down and climbed into bed, a full size mattress clearly not up to the task of handling both of them. He would wait for his paychecks to come in so he could buy a better mattress for the two of them, a nice bed, perfect for the girl who never really had a safe place to lay her head. He would also have to buy Rey a ring at some point, but she wasn't concerned about that. As far as she was concerned, she already wore a sign of his possession. He wanted something for the human side.  
  
He laps his tongue along her skin as if she were slaking his thirst. He tastes her collarbones her breasts her sternum. He feels her heart racing beneath his tongue.

She whines desperately, rolling her hips, seeking out the hardness of him where she needs it the most.  
  
“Please, Kylo...” she breathes. “Please fuck me, I want you so bad, baby.”

He smiles hungrily. Every bit the wolf.  
  
She had become an expert at code-switching, he notices with some pride. Around Leia, she would call him Ben, in deference to her pack leader. But alone, wrapped in him, he was Kylo. Always her Kylo.  
  
"Of course, sweetheart, whatever you need. You know I love it when you beg."  
  
Despite the protests of his own body, he pulls himself away from her to rifle in his bedside drawer for condoms.

She grabs his wrist and pulls him back to her with a smirk and a kiss.  
  
“I got a birth control shot last week. I’m locked down like the Kremlin.”  
  
She winks.  
  
“Now are you going to scent me properly or what?”

He smiles again.  
  
"Glad to see you're going to the vet. Hope you haven't been biting the nice doctors."

“Of course not! I don’t bite,” she purrs.

She scrapes her teeth delicately against the distorted double crescent-shaped knot of scar tissue at the crook of his neck.

“Much.”

He wriggles his hands underneath her thighs and once he gets a secure grip, drags her towards his hips. He curls over her.

"Play your cards right and I might just let you do that again."

She giggles delightedly and her smile is dazzling. It catches in his chest and makes his breath snag somewhere near his heart.

“Lucky dog.”

He hugs her legs to his side and bends over to kiss her, as if her grin was contagious and he could keep it himself. His cock brushes against her and he is practically buzzing with eagerness.

"Do you mean me or you?"

“Yes.”

He laughs, burying his face into her shoulder. His hand wanders to her cunt.

" _Yes_ ," he purrs.

When his fingers find her, all silky liquid heat, she has to stop herself from wailing at the contact. Instead, she lunges upward and bites into the meat of his shoulder. It’s not hard enough to bleed this time, but definitely enough for a lovely bruise.

He throws his head back, a laugh caught in the gasp of rapture that escapes him. Somehow, despite the blinding pleasure, his hand returns to his cock and guides it into her, his hips rocking to enter her slowly.

The sensation forces her mouth from his shoulder with a strangled cry.  
  
“Oh fuck _yes_ ,” she groans.  
  
Her hips lift to pull him in even deeper.

His hands clutch her ass and he begins fucking her in earnest. He bends at the waist so he can reach her mouth with his, and the heat of the friction growing between them soon has him sweating, that sandalwood scent makes her less and less human by the minute.

She writhes and twists beneath him like a woman possessed, panting and snarling. Moonrise is still a ways off, but the beast waiting in her blood makes her wild and she can't hold still while her mate is pounding into her so ferociously. She wants she hungers she needs she could just _howl_ for the pleasure singing in her bone marrow.

He gathers both of her wrists in one broad hand and drags her to the head of the bed, pinning her arms above her head.  
  
“Stay,” he commands, pulling his body over her.

She moans helplessly and her fingers curl obediently against the old wrought iron headboard. She holds on for dear life as every roll of his hips pull her closer to the edge of ecstasy.  
  
“God, alpha, _yes_ ,” she pants. “You...you feel so—ah, fuck—so good...please, don’t stop.”

And he doesn’t. His free hand throws her leg over his shoulder so he can feel her deeper still. He pauses long enough to kiss her deeply, playfully clenching her lower lip in his teeth, then resumes.

The sounds he’s wringing out of her are nothing short of feral.  
  
At this point she doesn’t care if Leia hears them. She will happily endure the forthcoming teasing and disapproving eyebrows. For a feeling like this, fuck, she’d wear a scarlet A around the local ACME.  
  
Her eyes roll back in her head and she melts into the fire Kylo is stoking in her gut.

Panting and hot and feeling better than any man has a right to (than he specifically has a right to, anyway), he pulls out of her and releases her hands.  
  
"Roll over. You know the drill."

She does so, groaning teasingly.  
  
“Stay, roll over...Am I getting a treat and a belly rub too?” she ribs, peering over her shoulder.

"What, am I not already giving you enough of a treat?"  
  
He places his hands on her sides, wrapping around her ribs, and wiggles his fingers along her belly.

She squeals with laughter, trying to twist away from him.

Pressing himself against her back, he snakes an arm around her middle, his straining cock teasing at her ass.  
  
"Bad girl," he growls in her ear.

“Not...my fault,” she gasps. “You’re the one...who decided...to tickle me.”  
  
She squirms her hips against him, purring coyly.  
  
“Am I too bad to fuck, then?”

He slaps her ass, resulting in a loud clap audible throughout the house.  
  
"No, I'll just have to punish you harder."

Her gasp becomes a growl.  
  
“Oh yes please.”

He sits up, his hands gripping her buttocks with a hunger bordering on desperation.

“ _Someone's got to draw first blood_ ,” he hums, gazing down at her to find her slit. He slides in, grunting at the feel of her, raw and close and tight around him.

“Why...do you keep quoting Meat Loaf during sex,” she half-groans, half-giggles.  
  
“You mated...with me,” he gasps, laughing at himself. “You knew what...what you were getting into. _”_

He thrusts slow as he tries to bend forward to reach her ear.

“Are you...are you feeling good?”

Her head drops onto the mattress with a rough moan, her hands kneading the sheets under her fingers. Her back arches up into his chest as she rolls her hips back to meet his thrusts.

“I am so... _so_ tempted to quote--fucking _shit--_ ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light,’ but I am too close to even...t-try to think ah-about anything else right now.”

He snakes a hand forward to entwine in her hair, and pulls her head back. She gasps.

“Good,” he growls. “Think of nothing but me.”

“ _Yes,_ alpha,” she breathes.

She reaches back to grasp onto the arm supporting him over her. Her nails dig into the hard muscle of his forearm as she gives in to the lightning echoing through her veins.

He releases her suddenly, the sweat of his exertions dripping off of him. She whimpers as he slides out of her, but his hands lock around her hips and flip her over to face him.

“I’m close,” he says, face inches from hers. “Are you?”

She nods frantically, her brow furrowed in concentration.

“Good.” He kisses her deeply, slowly, closing his eyes. When he resurfaces for air, he smiles at her.

“I love you.”

She smiles back, feral and hungry and adoring all at the same time. Her hands come up to hold onto his shoulders, keeping him close as his breath huffs across her flushed skin. The pace he builds jars her bones and pummels that impossible spot inside her. Her legs are shaking from the effort of holding off her climax. It’s pointless, honestly, she’s already well past the point of no return. And judging by the determined set of his jaw and the frenzied rhythm of his hips, so is he.

“I love you, Kylo. Fuck, I love you so much,” she gasps. “God, I’m…”

She doesn’t need to finish her sentence. Her spine bows, her muscles seize, and Rey _howls._

Kylo isn’t far behind. The fluttering of her cunt around his cock pushes him straight over the edge and he has exactly enough time before his brain liquefies to pull out, his cum splattering across his mate’s stomach.

_There_ , his inner wolf chuffs proudly, _now she’s scented properly_.

He collapses onto the bed next to her, curling himself around her shuddering body as they both try to catch their breath.

She turns her head to nudge his nose with hers, brushing a lazy kiss over his lips.

“There we go,” she mumbles happily. “I smell like you. You smell like me. I think that’s enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“To guide me home.”

 

Kylo clicks on the lamp.

He can see the two figures crossing the lawn towards the forest, one in a light blue dressing gown, now faded and silvery in the moonlight; the other wears a dark, shapeless bathrobe, much too large for her slender form.

Kylo knows the garment well. It was his father’s. Rey was more than delighted to accept the gift from her new alpha. He reflects at how his mother had kept it for so long with a twinge of sorrow and a jolt of surprise.

She knew, somehow. The old bitch.

He pulls the blanket higher up his waist and zips up his coat a little more. The cold is settling in earlier this season, he thinks. Perhaps he just forgot what the autumnal chill feels like in this area.

Maybe it’s the sight of the older alpha and his mate, striding hand and hand to the place where they would shed their clothes and skin and reveal their secret selves to the moonlight.

Rey shoots a look over her shoulder at him. She smiles. Her nose crinkles. He loves her all the more.

He hopes their scents are intertwined enough that Rey will not forget him when she changes. He knows it’s a lot to hope for. But according to Leia, god did they stink at dinner.

Rey looks back at the dark haired man waiting for her on the porch in an old rocking chair, a standing lamp beside him and a dog-eared copy of _Salem’s Lot_ on his lap.

She smiles at him. Her mate is a man, yes, and part alpha, and the combination of things made him uniquely hers.

His scent is still heavy in her nostrils. She won’t lose him easily.

Leia squeezes her hand. “It’s time. You can leave your robe here.”

Rey strips, shivering at the snap of the chilly air against her bare skin, and she can see the goosebumps rising quickly.

She looks back at Kylo. He’s fiddling with the book on his lap, but he hasn’t taken his eyes off of her.

“Can I shift here?”

Leia looks back at her son, the scar on his face cuts a line of shadow over his cheek. She hesitates, but nods.

“I’ll howl for you when I get out there. Just be careful.”

 

The moon calls, as it always does.

And, as she had since she had first become a woman, Rey answers.

She answers the moon with every cell of her body, with the pulse of her blood, with the crack of her bones.

This night, as always, she answers the moon.

But as her vision changes and she sees through golden eyes, she answers a different call.

She follows the scent. The scent of home. Of him.

She looks up at the human man with alpha scent. Mate.

“Nice to see you again, sweetheart,” he says, cautiously holding out a hand to her.

She sniffs his fingers delicately. Obviously satisfied by the smell, she nuzzles his hand, nudging it until it rests on the top of her head.

“I’ll miss you, too. Have fun. Keep an eye out for Mom for me, alright?”

He almost thinks her head bob is one of understanding. She doesn’t move.

“You’ll find me again. I’ll be what you’re looking for.”

The copper wolf stares at him for a second longer, then she turns away. He watches her dart off into the woods and vanish into the trees as a mournful howl splits the night air.

After a moment and a smoky breath, Kylo tears his eyes away from the treeline and returns to his book.

This would always be enough.

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, kids, 80 pages later and we’ve (finally) come to the end of “I Can Change.” This was a very different kind of writing exercise for us, but we had an absolute blast writing it. We hope you all enjoyed reading it just as much. 
> 
> Stay tuned for the next track of The Desired Effect, and if you haven’t checked out our Conceal Me What I Am series yet, we hope you will. 
> 
>  
> 
> A big beautiful shout out to [monsterleadmehome](https://monsterleadmehome.tumblr.com) for the GORGEOUS moodboard you made for us!
> 
>  
> 
> [](https://imgur.com/PPOXqPv)
> 
>  
> 
> Follow Killtheselights on [tumblr](https://kill-these-lights.tumblr.com/)
> 
> (TheLadyoftheHouse doesn't have one. We're like Ursula and Ariel. Killtheselights stole my voice and put it in a seashell. Side note: my apologies to the Kingdom of Denmark for making a mess of your harbor. Sea witch is a hard stain to get out.)

**Author's Note:**

> TheLadyoftheHouse: "So...what are we doing for 'I Can Change'?"
> 
> Killtheselights: "...are we gonna do werewolves?"
> 
> TheLady: "Yeah, we're gonna do werewolves."
> 
>  
> 
> So anyway, here's some werewolves.


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